Flight Delays and Lost Luggage: What Indian Families Can Actually Claim

Twenty-one days, and almost nobody knows it.

If your checked bag is delayed on an international flight, the Montreal Convention as enacted in Indian law gives you a window for a written complaint: “within twenty-one days from the date on which the baggage or cargo have been placed” at your disposal. For a damaged bag the window is far shorter, “within seven days from the date of receipt in the case of checked baggage.”

Miss those windows and the claim is not weakened. Rule 31(4) of the Third Schedule puts it plainly: “If no complaint is made within the period specified in sub-rule (2), no action shall lie against the carrier, except in the case of fraud committed by the carrier.” Unless you can show fraud by the airline, it is gone.

That is the single most useful thing on this page, and it is why the page opens with it rather than with compensation tables. A family that files on day 30, holding a folder of receipts, has a folder of receipts.

If you are reading this at an airport, the one-screen table is under “At the counter, in one screen”. Everything before it explains where those figures come from.

Which rules govern which leg

Two different bodies of rules apply to a Dubai trip, and mixing them up is why families quote the wrong entitlement at the wrong counter.

Baggage runs on the Montreal Convention, which India enacted in the Third Schedule to the Carriage by Air Act, 1972. It governs international carriage in both directions, so the seven-day and 21-day windows above apply whether the bag goes missing in Mumbai or in Dubai.

Delay, cancellation and denied boarding run on the Indian regulator’s rules, in the Directorate General of Civil Aviation’s Civil Aviation Requirement, Section 3, Series M, Part IV. Issue I took effect Feb. 15, 2023, with Revision 4 dated Jan. 25, 2023.

That CAR names international flying in its own opening. Paragraph 1.1 begins: “In view of rapid expansion of air services within India and on international routes to/from India and with the increase in volume of passenger traffic, it has become necessary…” Paragraph 1.2 extends the protections to passengers travelling “not only on scheduled flights but also on non-scheduled flights and foreign carriers operating to/from India.” Paragraph 1.7: “This CAR shall be applicable to all scheduled and non-scheduled operators.”

This article found no paragraph in the CAR limiting it by where a flight departs from. Several paragraphs do turn on whether a flight is domestic or international, or on where the carrier comes from, and each is dealt with in its own place below. Paragraph 3.4.2’s six-hour refund option is written for domestic flights only. Paragraph 3.5.1, on downgrading, goes the other way and sets out international entitlements by distance band. And paragraph 3.6.1 addresses foreign carriers directly, which is the one every Dubai passenger needs and which has its own section here.

One planning consequence follows before any of the detail. A connection is where most of these problems are born, and a non-stop removes the whole category, so which Indian cities have a non-stop to Dubai is worth checking at booking rather than after.

None of that is a legal opinion, and this page is not one. It reproduces what two published instruments say and tells you where they say it. What either means for your particular booking is a question for the airline, the DGCA and, if it comes to it, a consumer forum.

What the DGCA rules give you when a flight is cancelled

Two things decide the answer: how much notice you had, and how long the flight was.

Notice. The CAR works from two bands: whether the airline informed you at least two weeks before departure, or less than two weeks before and up to 24 hours of the scheduled time.

Compensation, where it is due. Paragraph 3.3.2 is explicit that this is “compensation in addition to the full refund of air ticket”, which is the half families most often lose: it is not instead of your money back. The amounts attach to block time, and every one of them is capped by your own fare:

Block time of the cancelled flight	Compensation
Up to 1 hour	INR 5,000 or booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, whichever is less
More than 1 hour, up to 2 hours	INR 7,500 or booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, whichever is less
More than 2 hours	INR 10,000 or booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, whichever is less

Three things in that table are routinely misread.

“Whichever is less” is not decoration. On a cheap fare the ceiling is your fare, not the headline number. A family reading “INR 10,000” and expecting INR 10,000 each has misread the rule.

The base is “booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge”, not the price you paid. Taxes, convenience fees and whatever the booking site added are outside it.

It is payable in defined circumstances, which the CAR ties to not being informed within the required period, or to missing a connecting flight on the same ticket. It is not an automatic payment for every cancellation.

And the exception that removes a great many claims, which is wider than almost any article admits.

Paragraph 3.3.4 disapplies compensation where “the cancellations occur due to extraordinary circumstances beyond the control of the airline (as described in Para 1.4 and Para 1.5) even if all reasonable measures had been taken by the airline.”

Read what those two paragraphs actually do. Paragraph 1.4 gives an open list, not a closed one. Its examples are “political instability, natural disaster, civil war, insurrection or riot, flood, explosion, government regulation or order affecting the aircraft, strikes and labour disputes causing cessation, slowdown or interruption of work”, and then it ends: “or any other factors that are beyond the control of the airline.” The list illustrates. It does not limit.

Paragraph 1.5 goes further and it is the one that decides most real cases. Airlines “would also not be liable to pay any compensation in respect of cancellations and delays clearly attributable to Air Traffic Control (ATC), meteorological conditions, security risks, or any other causes that are beyond the control of the airline but which affect their ability to operate flights on schedule.”

Weather is named there. Air traffic control is named there. Between them, those two causes account for a very large share of the delays and cancellations a family will ever meet, and in each of them the CAR says no compensation is payable.

So do not walk to a counter expecting a payout for a weather cancellation. What the CAR still gives you in those cases is the facilities, which the delay section below sets out, and those are not conditioned on fault. Compensation and facilities are different things, and the facilities are the ones you can usually actually ask for.

There is a second exclusion that catches families more often than they expect. Paragraph 3.3.3: “No financial compensation shall be payable to passengers who have not provided adequate contact information (email id or a phone number) at the time of making booking or when the ticket for firm travel on the selected flight is issued.” If you booked through an agent and your own mobile number and email never reached the airline, this is the paragraph that will be quoted at you. Check that the airline holds your contact details on your own booking, before you fly.

Denied boarding, which is a different thing again

Denied boarding is not a delay and not a cancellation. It is the airline refusing to carry a passenger who holds a confirmed booking, and the CAR treats it more seriously than either. It sits in section 3.2.

Before any of that, paragraph 3.2.1 requires the airline to look for volunteers first: where confirmed passengers outnumber seats, “an airline must first ask for volunteers to give up their seats so as to make seats available for other booked passengers to travel on the flight, in exchange of such benefits/facilities as the airline, at its own discretion, may wish to offer, provided airports concerned have dedicated check-in facilities/gate areas which make it practical for the airline to do so.” Two things ride on that sentence. The benefits are at the airline’s discretion, which is worth knowing before a family volunteers for something vague. And the whole obligation is conditioned on the airport having dedicated check-in or gate areas that make it practical, so it is not an unqualified duty everywhere.

Where boarding is denied involuntarily, paragraph 3.2.2 sets four outcomes. Two of them are the ones a gate agent will mention.

What the airline arranges	What is due
An alternate flight departing within one hour of the original	No compensation
An alternate flight within 24 hours	200% of booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, subject to maximum of INR 10,000
An alternate flight beyond 24 hours	400% of booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, subject to maximum of INR 20,000
You decline the alternate flight	Full value of ticket, and compensation equal to 400% of booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, subject to maximum of INR 20,000

The first row is the one that goes unmentioned at a gate. An alternate departing within the hour carries no compensation at all, so a family pressed to accept a quick rebooking should know it is accepting the no-compensation outcome.

The last row is the one families do not know they have. Declining the alternate gets you the ticket’s full value back and the 400% compensation, not one or the other.

Note also that the structure inverts against the cancellation table. Here the percentage is the entitlement and the rupee figure is the ceiling. On a reasonable fare the cap is what you receive.

Paragraph 3.2.3 extends this to connecting flights. A passenger booked on connecting flights, denied boarding on the first leg, is compensated by the airline of that first flight under 3.2.2 where he “has arrived at the final destination at least three hours later than the scheduled arrival time.” Three hours against the scheduled arrival, not against the departure.

For a family, denied boarding also raises a question the money does not answer: whether the airline is splitting the party. A group booking that gets partially boarded is a worse problem than a fully denied one, and it is worth raising at the gate before anyone accepts anything, because the compensation table settles money and settles nothing about whether your party travels together.

Delay, and the word the whole section turns on

Delay does not carry compensation under the CAR the way cancellation does. It carries facilities, and they are not conditioned on whose fault the delay was, which is why they are the thing worth asking for.

Facilities become due at a threshold set by block time. Paragraph 3.8.1 says what the word covers, and it is worth knowing that it is only two things: “Meals and refreshments in relation to waiting time” under 3.8.1(a), and “Hotel Accommodation when necessary (including transfers)” under 3.8.1(b). Nothing else is in it.

The thresholds:

Block time of the flight	Delay at which facilities are due
Up to 2.5 hours	2 hours or more
More than 2.5 hours and up to 5 hours	3 hours or more
Anything not falling in those two bands	4 hours or more

Block time is the CAR’s unit here, and it is not the flying time and not the gate-to-gate figure a booking site shows. If your band is borderline, ask the airline what block time it files for the flight rather than assuming the duration printed on your ticket is the same number.

Hotel accommodation, under paragraph 3.4.3, becomes due where the delay exceeds 24 hours, or 6 hours for a flight scheduled to depart between 2000 and 0300 hrs. That second condition is the one families need, because it is the overnight case.

And now the qualifier that matters most on this page. Paragraph 3.4.2 begins “When domestic flight is expected to be delayed for more than 6 hrs from the published scheduled time of departure…” and then requires an alternate flight within six hours or a full refund. That paragraph says domestic. A Dubai flight is not a domestic flight, so do not walk to a counter in Dubai quoting a six-hour refund right. Whether any equivalent reaches an international departure is part of the open question at the top of this page, and this article does not answer it.

One thing the CAR gives no family: anything for the hours below the threshold, with a small child, in the middle of the night. What an unplanned night does to a child under 3 is worth reading before you book a 1 a.m. departure with a toddler, because the rules will not rescue that decision.

Ask at the counter at the moment your threshold passes, and name the threshold. A family that can say which band its flight is in is asking for a published entitlement rather than a favour.

Downgrading, the entitlement written for international sectors

Paragraph 3.5.1 covers involuntary downgrading, where the airline moves you to a lower class than the one you bought. It is the one place in the CAR where international flying gets its own schedule, and it is worth reading for that reason as much as for the money.

Flight	Reimbursement
Domestic	75% of the cost of ticket including taxes
International, up to 1,500 km	30% of the cost of ticket including taxes
International, 1,500 to 3,500 km	50% of the cost of ticket including taxes
International, over 3,500 km	75% of the cost of ticket including taxes

Two things about that table are unusual and both favour you.

The base is the cost of the ticket including taxes, not the “booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge” that caps the compensation figures elsewhere on this page. It is the only place in this CAR where the whole ticket price is the base.

There is no rupee ceiling. The compensation tables above are capped at INR 10,000 or INR 20,000. This one is a straight percentage.

Which band your route sits in depends on its distance, which this page does not publish for any city pair. Take it from your own booking or ask the airline, and note that the band boundaries are 1,500 km and 3,500 km.

If you are flying a foreign carrier, read this paragraph

If your Dubai flight is operated by a carrier that is not Indian, the CAR has a paragraph written for exactly that case. It is short, and it qualifies every figure on this page.

Paragraph 3.6.1: “In the case of foreign carriers, the amount of compensation paid to the passengers shall be as contained in the regulations of their country of origin or as given in para 3.2.2/3.3.2/3.5.1 of this CAR.”

Read it slowly, because the word doing the work is or.

For a foreign carrier, the amount payable is either what that carrier’s home regulator requires, or what paragraphs 3.2.2, 3.3.2 and 3.5.1 of this CAR set out. Those are the three paragraphs behind the three tables on this page: denied boarding, cancellation and downgrading. So the figures above are not irrelevant to a foreign carrier. They are one of the two things the amount can be.

What this page will not tell you is which limb applies to your booking, or who chooses between them. The paragraph does not say, and this article will not decide it for you. What it gives you is the question to put to the airline, in writing, and the wording to put it in: under paragraph 3.6.1 of CAR Section 3, Series M, Part IV, are you applying your home regulator’s amounts or the amounts in paragraphs 3.2.2, 3.3.2 and 3.5.1?

An airline that answers that question in writing has told you which schedule to hold it to. One that will not has told you something else.

At the counter, in one screen

Everything above that you might need to say out loud, with nothing that does not apply to a Dubai flight.

Situation	What the CAR gives you	Paragraph
Delay reaching your block time band	Facilities at the airport: 2 hours on a block time up to 2.5 hours, 3 hours on more than 2.5 and up to 5, 4 hours otherwise	3.4.1
Delay over 24 hours, or over 6 hours on a departure between 2000 and 0300 hrs	Hotel accommodation	3.4.3
Cancellation you were not told about in time, or a missed connection on the same ticket	Alternate flight, or compensation in addition to the full refund	3.3.1, 3.3.2
Denied boarding, alternate within one hour	Nothing	3.2.2
Denied boarding, alternate within 24 hours	200%, capped at INR 10,000	3.2.2
Denied boarding, alternate beyond 24 hours, or you decline it	400%, capped at INR 20,000, plus the full ticket value if you decline	3.2.2
Weather, air traffic control or a security risk caused it	No compensation. Facilities still apply	1.5, 3.3.4
Your contact details never reached the airline	No compensation. Refund or alternate still apply	3.3.3
You are moved to a lower class than you booked	30%, 50% or 75% of the ticket cost including taxes, by distance band, with no rupee cap	3.5.1

The six-hour refund is not in this table because paragraph 3.4.2 confines it to domestic flights.

One qualifier applies to every row above if your carrier is not Indian. Paragraph 3.6.1 says a foreign carrier’s amounts are its home regulator’s or the amounts in 3.2.2, 3.3.2 and 3.5.1. Read the foreign carrier section before you quote a figure from this table at an Emirates or flydubai counter.

Money spent while you wait is money you will want to reclaim, so keep every receipt and pay in a way that produces one. Which of your cards will actually work at an airport counter abroad is a question worth settling before you leave, and which card survives an airport at 2 a.m. covers it.

The baggage limits, and the figure two sources disagree on

The Montreal Convention sets what an airline can be liable for, and the figures moved recently.

ICAO’s revised limits took effect Dec. 28, 2024, the fourth adjustment since the Convention entered force in 2003, made to adjust for inflation every five years. The figures:

What	Revised limit
Baggage, destroyed, lost, damaged or delayed	1,519 SDR
Delay to a passenger	6,303 SDR
Death or bodily injury	151,880 SDR
Cargo	26 SDR per kilogram

Two warnings about that table, and both matter more than the numbers.

This page publishes no rupee equivalent. SDR is a basket of currencies that the IMF revalues daily. Any rupee figure printed here would be wrong within a day of publication, and every page that prints one is telling you a number that has already moved. Look up the current SDR rate on the day you claim.

The unit is per passenger, and there is a discrepancy worth knowing about. Rule 22(2) of the Third Schedule states the limit applies “for each passenger”, which settles the unit: it is not per bag and not per booking. But the text of the Third Schedule available on India Code still prints the figure as 1,288 Special Drawing Rights, the limit that applied before the December 2024 revision. ICAO’s revised figure is 1,519.

Rule 24 of the same Schedule explains how a revision is meant to work. The limits are reviewed by the depository at five-year intervals; where inflation exceeds ten per cent the depository notifies the State Parties of a revised limit, and the revision takes effect six months after notification unless a majority of State Parties object within three months. So the mechanism is designed to move the figure without reprinting the statute, which is a plausible reason the printed schedule and ICAO’s announcement differ. This page does not know that it is the reason, and it will not assert it. Raise both figures with the airline, in writing, before you accept any settlement.

And a limit is a ceiling, not an entitlement. It caps what an airline can be made to pay. It does not describe what your bag was worth, and it certainly does not describe what an airline will offer first.

What to do on the day, in order

Five steps, and the order matters more than the speed, in the same way it does for a lost passport.

One, before you leave the baggage hall. Report the missing or damaged bag while you are still airside, at the airline’s desk. Leaving the hall and phoning later turns a straightforward report into a disputed one.

Two, put it in writing, and watch the clock. Seven days for damage from the date you received the bag. Twenty-one days for delay from the date the bag was placed at your disposal. Those are the Convention’s own words and they are not negotiable by an airline’s own timetable.

Three, keep the evidence in the same folder as everything else. A written report, dated, is what every later step runs on. That is the same discipline that makes a police report the pivot of a lost passport day, and the day a document goes missing and what unlocks it sets out the parallel case.

Four, check what the airline pulled out of the bag. Security removes items from checked baggage, and anything with a lithium battery is the first candidate, so a bag that arrives lighter is not always a theft. Where a power bank is allowed to travel sets out which side of the split each item belongs on, and it is worth knowing before you argue with anyone.

Five, know the outer limit. Rule 35(1): “The right to damages shall be extinguished if an action is not brought within a period of two years, reckoned from the date of arrival at the destination, or from the date on which the aircraft ought to have arrived, or from the date on which the carriage stopped.” Two years from one of those three dates is the end of the road, whatever anybody tells you about internal review.

What a delay actually costs an Indian family, beyond the fare

The compensation rules address the flight. They do not address the trip, and for a family the trip is where the money goes.

Timed attraction slots. A booked slot for a fixed date does not care that your aircraft did not leave. Whether that ticket can move depends entirely on who sold it to you, which is rarely the attraction, and why the seller decides whether a missed slot can move explains the difference before you book.

A first hotel night you slept through in a terminal. No aviation rule reaches it.

The medication in the checked bag. This is the one that turns an inconvenience into a problem. Anything a family member needs daily belongs in the cabin, in its original packaging with the prescription, and what the UAE lets you carry across its border is the page to read before you decide what goes where.

Whether your route even offers a daytime alternative is worth checking at booking rather than after. A non-stop removes the largest single source of these problems, which is a missed connection.

What this page will not tell you

Seven things, deliberately.

No rupee equivalent of any SDR figure. The IMF revalues the basket daily.

No rule on which baggage figure governs, the 1,288 SDR printed in India’s Third Schedule or the 1,519 SDR ICAO revised to in December 2024. Both appear on this page and the reconciliation is not this page’s to make.

No airline’s own baggage policy, interim expense allowance or per-day payout. Airlines set these individually and none was verified here.

No figure for what airlines pay in practice, or how long a claim takes. Neither the DGCA nor ICAO publishes it, and airlines do not publish it either. Any number you see for it comes from somebody’s sample rather than from a rule.

No ruling on whether your particular cancellation was an extraordinary circumstance. The CAR names the categories and this page reproduces them. Which one an airline is relying on, and whether it is entitled to, is a question for the airline and then for a consumer forum.

No answer on which limb of paragraph 3.6.1 a foreign carrier applies to you. The paragraph offers two and does not say who chooses.

No legal opinion on how any of this applies to your booking. This page reproduces published rules and says where they are published. It does not advise, and it is not a substitute for the airline’s own answer or a consumer forum’s.

Before you fly

Put the daily medication, the documents and one change of clothes per person in the cabin. Every version of a lost bag is smaller if this is done.

Photograph the inside of each checked bag before you close it. It costs ten seconds and it is the only inventory you will have.

Write the two windows somewhere you will find them. Seven days for damage, 21 days for delay.

Ask the airline, in writing, whether it holds your own mobile number and email on the booking. Paragraph 3.3.3 removes financial compensation from passengers whose contact details never reached the airline, and an agent booking is where that goes wrong.

Note your two delay thresholds. Facilities at two, three or four hours, depending on which block time band your flight falls in. A bed at six hours on a departure between 2000 and 0300 hrs, or 24 hours otherwise. There is no six-hour refund right here: that paragraph says domestic.

If the appeal of a package is that somebody else holds the airline relationship and rebooks the ground arrangements when a flight moves, that is a fair reason to buy one, and our Dubai family trips where a delayed flight is somebody’s job are set up that way. It does not change what the airline owes you. It changes who is on the phone about it at 4 a.m., and it does not extend the seven-day and 21-day windows, which remain yours to meet.