Terms and Conditions (T&C)

This is our mutual Agreement, written without jargon in a clear way, easy to read.
When you sign to use our services, we both agree to abide to the following :

Obligations

We are Aireclaim, the commercial name of Albuquerque Sousa, Aguiar & Sousa Lda, legal registration PT513645489, headquarted in R. Paulo da Gama 629  4150-589 Porto – Portugal, with office email geral@aireclaim.com.

Under this Agreement you give exclusive and irrevocable authorization for Aireclaim to initiate and fulfill a claim based on your rights as set by Regulation (EC) 261/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council and related rulings and to undertake all necessary related actions including to delegate or transfer, to receive payments and to process, request or supply personal data if necessary, though exclusively with the related entities and only for the mentioned purpose.

We, Aireclaim commit to

  • pay you 70% of the amount received,
  • keep you informed about your process,
  • do our best in order to obtain the claimed amount, and
  • do not ask you previous payment.

You, the passenger, commit to

  • not negotiate with the airline, forwarding us all correspondence.
  • pay us 30% of all related payments you receive, whatever the way or reason.

(Small print like this are comments, not legal statements.)
The obligation of not dealing with the airline is important for the passenger’s protection who have no expertise in this field as we have, assuring that they can not legally deal with airlines that might use tricks and arguments they cannot argue back, or try to seduce them with low proposals, ruining our hard work.

In order to provide the best success chances, we Aireclaim may in our discretion take the actions that we believe to be the best, including to accept, reject, counterclaim or negotiate with the airline and other entities, or delegate or transfer your process to other company under these same conditions.

Note the word “exclusive” above, meaning that you agree not to claim by yourself or use other firm for the same claim. In case you do or did it anyway, our share will still be due upon total or partial success no matter what you or each company did or not.
Double claiming brings no advantage at all, instead it can delay and arm your claim (otherwise we would create a 2nd company to enjoy such advantage, wouldn’t we?).

Procedures

This Agreement starts with your registration, made in this website after an automatic check based on your informations about the flight. These will be later personally checked and your entitlement confirmed.

You must send us some personal information and emails or photos of documents about the flight. You allow us to use this data exclusively for the purposes of this claim, according to our Privacy Policy that complies with EU laws.

If we conclude that you are not entitled, you will be informed, and we will not charge you our costs.
If our audit confirms your entitlement, we will contact the airline and will try to settle in a friendly way, trying to avoid litigation.

Frequently, payment is denied by the airline arguing some technical or legal reasons that the Law considers out of their liability. We will investigate to confirm or deny the legal worthiness of the refusal arguments. This way, if we approve a refusal, you can be sure that compensation was not due and still you will not pay us anything.

If the airline does not answer within two months or if we do not approve their refusal, the process enters litigation mode. Then we will have several ways of action, such as proceeding with a lawsuit and/or escalating to litigation or mediation organizations like ADRs or aviation regulatory agencies.  We have no obligation to explain our decisions, but will keep you informed. In litigation mode our work, time and expenses will be huge so, an additional fee of 20% will be due, but only in case and after success.
Your presence will not be required in Court, but you agree to cooperate with us or our lawyers if further information, documents or evidence is needed.

Payment

When we succeed in the exaction of the claim, we will process your payment within 2 weeks after receiving the money.
You agree that in case the airline pays directly to you, you will immediately inform and pay us our share and that if you fail to do that within 2 weeks, our share will increase to the full value of our costs  or  80% of the amount you received, whichever is higher.

Payments are transferred in euros to the SEPA bank that you inform us. We might process other currencies, if possible. Bank and exchange expenses, if any, will be on your side.
We comply with all rulings, so fiscal taxes must be applied whenever the law enforces it. (normally 23% VAT, so when applied to 30%, this means a tax of 6.9% )
Each payment is free up to €100 and has a handling fee of €15 for amounts  €100.01-200, €25 for €200.01-800 or €40 above. To reduce this fee, in case of shared bookings we will transfer all payments to a single account if the other persons (minors excluded) give us clearance to do so.
In case of non-SEPA payment
there is a €10 fee (examples: non-euro currency, other payment method like Paypal, WU, etc),
Cash or cheque payments are not available.
If our payment fails due to a reason of your responsibility – ex: wrong bank data- we will repeat payment deducting bank charges if any, and a 10€ fee for administrative work.

Three months after our second notification of success to the email that you registered, if you still didn’t provide us a way to pay you, that payment will be considered as no longer due and will be redirected to a charity institution or any other destiny that we decide.
In such case and also upon payment or no entitlement, this Agreement will be terminated and no further obligations due from each side.

Because we are audited by the European Union, the bank proofs and other documents in your process will be kept for 5 years. You hereby accept not to request its deletion until then.

Right of Withdrawal

In EU and in some other countries, you have the legal right to withdraw this Agreement within the next 14 days of signing.  No reasons asked, no form or bureaucracy required, just mail a simple signed+dated letter to our postal address.
However, you hereby give us approval to not wait and start immediately processing your case (voiding your 14-day withdrawal right), unless you oppose informing us on the registration comment field, so that we will hold our work for 14 days.

Anyway, even after those legal 14 days we might accept to quit our Agreement, as long as you pay our expenses meanwhile occurred (note they can be much higher than 30%). But, why would you want this?

Other

-Occasionally these Terms can be updated without advise, and the last posted version will be the valid one in every future moment
-We are associated with other leading and trustful claiming companies and in some special situations we can forward a process to them if we believe that it is better for the claim’s success, due to strategic or legal reasons. In such case you will be informed, you can refuse or you don’t need to do nothing and your case will still be carefully handled under similar terms.
Note about Portuguese claims:  Nos casos em que a jurisdição do processo seja a Portuguesa, por motivos legais que nos impedem atuar diretamente, iremos redirecionar o seu caso para uma empresa europeia da nossa confiança ou para uma equipe de advogados nacionais especializada nesta área. As condições são as mesmas e será informado(a), obviamente.