Ferry cancelled because of bad weather — do you still get your money back?
Last reviewed 18 October 2026
Your sailing is cancelled. The operator posts a notice blaming the weather, and that seems to be the end of it. Bad weather is nobody's fault, so nobody pays.
That is half right, and the half that is wrong is the half worth money.
Two different rights, and only one has a weather exception
EU Regulation 1177/2010 gives a disrupted passenger two separate things, and they are easy to confuse because both feel like "getting your money back".
Reimbursement is the fare you already paid, returned to you — your right when a sailing is cancelled or leaves more than 90 minutes late. You can take the refund, or take re-routing to your destination at no extra cost. The choice is yours, not the operator's.
Compensation is a percentage paid to you on top, for arriving at your destination late. It is calculated on the fare for the delayed leg, and the threshold you have to cross rises with how long the crossing was scheduled to take.
Now the part that matters. Article 20 of the Regulation sets out when a carrier can decline — and it does not decline both.
Article 20(4) lets the carrier refuse compensation where the delay was caused by weather conditions endangering the safe operation of the ship, or by extraordinary circumstances. Article 20(3) carves out only the accommodation obligation on the same grounds.
Neither of them reaches reimbursement.
A cancelled sailing still owes you the fare back, whatever the weather did. The weather exception is written against the compensation article, and it stays there.
The only exception that reaches reimbursement is Article 20(1), and it is narrow: it covers open tickets where no departure time was specified. If your ticket named a sailing, it does not apply to you.
"Bad weather" is a test, not a word
Even for compensation, the exception is not satisfied by weather simply being bad. The wording is weather conditions endangering the safe operation of the ship — a real threshold, about safety, not about discomfort or inconvenience.
High winds that genuinely made a crossing unsafe will meet it. A grey, choppy, miserable day on which the ship could have sailed will not. Nor does congestion, a late inbound rotation, or a crew shortage become a weather event because the weather was poor that morning.
Whether it is met is a judgement, and under the Regulation it is the operator's judgement to make first. But it is a judgement they have to be able to defend, not a word they can post on a status page to close the matter.
What this means in practice
If your sailing was cancelled and the operator cites weather:
- You are still owed your choice of a full refund or re-routing. Ask for it plainly, and say which one you want.
- If they refuse on weather grounds, ask which article they are relying on. Weather does not reach Article 18.
If your sailing ran but arrived late and the operator cites weather:
- This is the case where the exception can genuinely apply.
- It still has to be weather that endangered safe operation. If the published reason looks more like scheduling than safety, it is worth putting the claim in and making them say so.
Either way, there is a deadline, and it is shorter than people expect — see how long you have to claim.
Where the figures are
This page deliberately quotes no percentages or delay thresholds, because they depend on how long your crossing was scheduled to take, and we would rather show you the live figures than a number that drifts out of date on a page like this one.
The thresholds are on our rights page, read from the same rules our eligibility engine uses.
This is general information about Regulation (EU) No 1177/2010, not legal advice. ReFerry prepares claims for passengers to file through the operator's own process; the operator decides the claim and pays you directly.