Coach delay compensation and the 250 km line

The 250 km line

The coach rules split UK travel in two, and they split it by distance. The full set of delay and cancellation rights applies only to scheduled services with a scheduled distance of 250 km or more.

Below that line, the refund-or-rerouting choice does not apply. The 50% compensation does not apply. The meals and accommodation duties do not apply. Not reduced, not discretionary: they are simply not part of the scheme for those services.

That is not a footnote. A large share of domestic UK coach travel is short-hop. London to Birmingham is roughly 163 km and carries none of these rights. London to Manchester, at roughly 262 km, carries all of them.

One more exclusion, and it catches people. Private hire and excursion coaches are outside the delay and cancellation rights whatever the distance. A hired coach or a coach tour is a different contract.

What is left on a short route

You are not left with nothing under 250 km, but what survives does not produce a payment. The rules that still apply to a short route are the ones about fair and non-discriminatory fares, the protections and staff training for disabled passengers, information at terminals, and the complaint-handling and enforcement machinery.

None of that turns a late coach into money. What is left in practice is the operator's own policy and general consumer law, neither of which gives you a fixed percentage of the fare.

A reader who learns that in thirty seconds has been served better than one who spends an afternoon drafting a claim that was never going to land. If that is you, the train and flight schemes are far more generous, and both pay on the delay alone.

What a two hour delay actually gets you

On a qualifying route, the trigger is a cancellation, an overbooking, or a delay of more than 120 minutes in departing from a terminal. What it triggers is a choice, which the operator must offer you immediately:

• carry on, or be rerouted to your destination at no extra cost and under comparable conditions, at the earliest opportunity; or
• your money back, plus, where relevant, a free coach back to where you first set off.

The same choice applies where the service is cancelled or delayed by more than 120 minutes from an ordinary bus stop rather than a staffed terminal. You do not lose the right by having boarded somewhere without a building.

A refund is due within 14 days of the offer being made or your request being received.

If the coach breaks down partway, the operator has to either continue the journey with another vehicle from where it stopped, or get you to a terminal or waiting point from which you can carry on.

When the 50% is really owed

Almost every page on the web says a two hour coach delay pays 50% of your fare. That is wrong, and it is worth being precise about why.

The 50% is owed only where the operator fails to offer you the choice set out above. It is then payable on top of the refund, and due within one month of your request.

So two passengers on the same delayed coach can end up in different places. The one who was offered a seat on the next service, or the fare back, and took it, gets what they took and nothing extra. The one who stood at the stop and was offered nothing at all gets the refund and 50% of the fare on top of it.

Food and a hotel, behind two more gates

Coach assistance has two conditions on top of the 250 km line, and both must be met:

• the journey's scheduled duration is more than 3 hours, and
• the departure is cancelled or delayed by more than 90 minutes.

Where both are met, the operator must provide free snacks, meals or refreshments in reasonable relation to the wait, where they can reasonably be supplied. Where an overnight stay becomes necessary, it must provide a hotel and help arranging transport to it. It may cap the accommodation at £70 a night, for up to two nights.

The ferry cap is three nights on the same £70 figure. Coach is two. The two schemes look alike and are not identical, which is worth knowing if a disrupted journey involved both.

What weather does and does not excuse

Operators lean on weather, and on coach the carve-out is much narrower than the leaning implies.

Severe weather or a major natural disaster endangering safe operation excuses the operator from one thing: paying for your accommodation. That is the whole of it.

It does not excuse:

• the choice between rerouting and a refund;
• the 50% owed for failing to offer that choice;
• the meals and refreshments.

This is the opposite of what several operator help pages imply, and it also breaks the symmetry with flights and ferries, where weather does reach the compensation. It comes straight from the text of the coach rules, linked at the foot of this page.

Two honest caveats. An operator can still raise arguments outside these rules about a particular incident, and a specific dispute can turn on its own facts. But on a qualifying route, "it was the weather" is not by itself an answer to a request for a refund or a rerouting.

How to complain, and to whom

Complain to the operator first, within three months of the date of the journey. They have one month to tell you whether the complaint is upheld, rejected or still being looked at, and up to three months from receiving it to give a final answer.

If that goes nowhere, give it around 14 working days and then take it to Bus Users UK, the designated complaint-handling body for bus and coach services outside London, and a certified dispute resolution scheme since 1 April 2017.

Behind that sits enforcement rather than adjudication. Traffic Commissioners handle coach operators licensed in Great Britain, and Trading Standards handles the rest. They act against operators, not on your individual claim. It is not the driving standards agency, which deals with vehicles and operator compliance rather than passenger complaints.

Where the operators take it

Checked in August 2026. Only routes of 250 km or more reach the rights described above, whichever operator you travelled with.

If your route does not qualify

Most readers who arrive on this page were on a short route, and leave knowing they have no claim. That is the correct answer and it is worth having in half a minute rather than half an evening.

The nearby schemes are better. A train that arrives 15 minutes late pays on most operators, and the Delay Repay guide has the threshold for each one. A flight that lands three hours late pays a fixed amount set in law, covered in the UK261 guide. And a late ferry pays a quarter or a half of the fare on a table keyed to the length of the crossing, with no 250 km line anywhere in it, in the ferry guide.

Sources

The rules described here are the retained Regulation (EU) No 181/2011 as amended for the UK. The specific provisions: Article 2 for the 250 km threshold and what applies below it, Article 19 for the choice, the 50% and the refund deadlines, Article 21 for meals and accommodation, Article 23 for the weather and open-ticket exemptions, and Article 27 for the complaint deadlines. The enforcement bodies are designated by the Rights of Passengers in Bus and Coach Transport (Exemptions and Enforcement) Regulations 2013.

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