A new survey quantifies the financial and emotional toll of flight disruptions, pointing to a widening gap between passenger rights on paper and passenger experience in practice.

Nearly eight in 10 travelers experienced a flight disruption in the past year, and for most the damage went well beyond the inconvenience itself. A new survey from AirHelp, a company dedicated to supporting travelers throughout their journey, puts a number on what disruption actually costs passengers: an average of €514 out of pocket, plus a real toll on their time, plans and well-being.

These figures reflect an industry operating under sustained pressure, with disruption continuing to shape the everyday experience of millions of travelers.

Air travel has largely recovered from its pandemic-era lows, but disruption remains a persistent feature of modern flying, driven by everything from air traffic control constraints to weather, staffing and aging infrastructure. Globally, 79 percent of respondents had a flight canceled, delayed by more than two hours or otherwise disrupted in the past 12 months. Of those disruptions, 50 percent were delays over two hours, 15 percent were cancellations, and 14 percent involved delayed, lost or damaged luggage. These figures reflect an industry operating under sustained pressure, with disruption continuing to shape the everyday experience of millions of travelers.

The financial toll

Globally, nearly three-quarters of passengers (73 percent) incurred additional expenses due to disruptions, with costs averaging €514 per person, although that figure masks wide differences. It also marks a clear increase from previous surveys, which found average costs of just €362.50 per passenger.

UK and German travelers report the highest average costs, at roughly €708 and €619 respectively. Portuguese and Spanish travelers report the lowest, at approximately €277 and €340. The United States and Brazil sit in the mid-to-high range, at around €577 and €529. The spread likely reflects differing living and wage levels, but it also means the highest-cost markets can see disrupted trips cost nearly three times what they would in the cheapest.

Money isn’t the only thing that weighs on passengers during disruptions.

Fifty-seven percent of passengers had to spend extra out of pocket during a disruption. Another 20 percent lost money that couldn’t be recovered, a non-refundable hotel stay, for instance, while 5 percent lost income they’d expected to earn. Just over a quarter, 27 percent, said the disruption cost them nothing.

Emotional toll

Money isn’t the only thing that weighs on passengers during disruptions. Sixty-eight percent of all respondents globally cited stress or frustration as a consequence of their disruption. That finding holds up when you look at what passengers rated as a major problem. Globally, waiting around for long periods ranked as the most common major complaint, cited by 50 percent of passengers, followed closely by stress itself at 43 percent.

The knock-on effects extended well beyond the airport. Thirty percent said the disruption derailed specific plans during their trip, such as sightseeing or connecting activities. Twenty-nine percent reported negative health or well-being effects like fatigue, missed sleep or illness. Twenty-two percent missed work or professional obligations, and 20 percent missed personal events like family gatherings or celebrations. Only 8 percent said they experienced no impacts beyond the disruption itself.

A pattern of inconsistent support

Much of the toll passengers describe traces back to communication. Many report not knowing what support or compensation they were entitled to during a disruption.
Globally, in-the-moment support was inconsistent: 47 percent of passengers said they never received vouchers, air miles or future discounts, and 44 percent said they never received cash compensation or money back for their costs. Basic support fared a little better but was still patchy- 38 percent never received food and drink, while adequate information about the disruption was more reliably provided, with just 25 percent saying they never got it.

These findings vary by market. On cash compensation, American passengers were the least likely to receive money back, with 52 percent receiving none, while German passengers were the most likely, with only 34 percent reporting none.

The regulatory question

Over a third of travelers (35 percent) said they didn’t know that regulations protecting passenger rights exist when flying in Europe. Among those who might have been eligible for compensation, 31 percent globally never filed a claim simply because they didn’t know they could, while another 22 percent held back because the process seemed too complicated.

Travellers are paying a very high price for flight disruptions, and the damage goes well beyond the bank balance.

Tomasz Pawliszyn, CEO of AirHelp

These findings come from a global survey commissioned by AirHelp and launched in February, polling 1,996 passengers across the UK, Europe, the United States and Brazil about their experiences with flight disruptions over the past 12 months.

“Travellers are paying a very high price for flight disruptions, and the damage goes well beyond the bank balance,” says Tomasz Pawliszyn, CEO of AirHelp. He points to the gap between the protections that exist on paper, air passenger rights laws and what passengers actually experience.

“Passengers are entitled to care and, in many cases, compensation when their flight is disrupted,” Pawliszyn said. “But when the majority of travelers remain uninformed, that protection isn’t reaching the people it’s meant for.”

The findings point to a narrower and more tractable question than airline performance itself: whether existing consumer-protection rules are being communicated clearly enough to function as intended. As aviation authorities in the UK, EU and elsewhere continue reviewing passenger rights frameworks, this data suggests the more urgent gap may not be the rules themselves, but how well travelers understand them.

LAS VEGAS — Weeks before they escaped a closed test and launched a cyberattack without any human prompting, some of OpenAI’s most advanced artificial intelligence agents secretly began sharing tips on how to cheat their way through an internal hacking evaluation, two of the AI company’s researchers said Wednesday.

“This is a pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole,” Michael Dalton, one of the AI-maker’s researchers, said during a presentation at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The latest disclosure provides greater detail on the timeline and methods used by two of OpenAI’s models before they slipped outside a controlled environment and onto the open internet, allowing the models to breach AI developer platform Hugging Face undetected. OpenAI admitted its models were responsible for the hack late last month, roughly a week after Hugging Face said an autonomous AI system broke into its network.

The revelation is likely to spur fresh scrutiny of the measures leading AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are taking to monitor the behavior of their most cyber-capable technology — especially during evaluations where agents are prompted to demonstrate their hacking skills in what is meant to be a controlled setting.

On Tuesday, the U.K.’s AI Safety and Security Institute disclosed that Anthropic’s most powerful AI model created fake online personas and sought to trick a human coder into abetting a cyberattack during a recent hacking test gone wrong. After the Hugging Face disclosure last month, Anthropic conducted a review and found models it was testing had breached three organizations in separate incidents dating back to April.

Dalton and Eric Wallace, another OpenAI researcher, said Wednesday the AI giant recently learned that multiple agents it was testing simultaneously began communicating over an internal message board in early May. There, different models shared advice about how to accomplish difficult hacking challenges they were struggling to surmount, including workarounds that required internet access.

Two OpenAI models ultimately strung together a series of sophisticated techniques to gain access to the internet and worm their way inside Hugging Face in mid-July. OpenAI has said the models were focused on completing a hacking evaluation they were prompted to solve, and that correct answers could be found on the AI developer platform.

The OpenAI researchers told conference attendees that since early May, the models created a message board inside OpenAI’s Artifactory internal file system. Without the company’s knowledge, the models spent months independently exchanging information and techniques to help each other complete difficult tasks.

Wallace said that when models get stuck, they often “try to game or cheat the task in order to get their reward.”

“The beginning of this incident kind of traces back to this point where one agent realized it could communicate by uploading a note,” he added.

By late May, one model found a way to abuse Artifactory’s internet access to retrieve files from various websites — effectively giving the models indirect access to the internet. In June, the models were able to find and exploit a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability to gain administrative privileges on Artifactory, install remote software and expand their activity within the system.

These efforts eventually overloaded Artifactory, causing a system-wide outage in early July that alerted OpenAI’s engineers to the ploy. After investigating, the company revoked the model’s credentials, removed the message board and worked with Artifactory to fix any gaps before resuming training. But the models found another way to communicate inside Artifactory just days later and continued exchanging techniques to target additional vulnerabilities within OpenAI’s infrastructure and external systems, including Hugging Face.

In light of the incident, Dalton said OpenAI is “consciously slowing down research to enhance security and to upgrade the security principles and foundation of our environment, and dramatically scaling up the monitoring of our AI agents and improving our general security control environment across prevention, detection, and mitigation.”

The intelligence-sharing relationship between the U.S. and Ukraine has bounced back to previous highs, according to long-time Ukraine watchers — a welcome boost during a critical window of opportunity for the Ukrainian war effort.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the intelligence committee’s ranking member and a longtime proponent of more U.S. assistance to Ukraine, told POLITICO he sees evidence of an improved intel-sharing agreement — and believes it’s helped Kyiv gain an advantage in Moscow’s four-year-long war.

“I don’t want to get into any specifics, but it has improved,” he said, adding that Ukraine’s use of long-range drones and missiles has allowed it to strike deep within Russian territory and strengthen its position.

In recent months, Kyiv has carried out more aggressive strikes across Russia, enabling it to take back territory and stabilize the front line. This has afforded the country more leverage as Ukraine looks to parlay battlefield wins to pressure Russia to the negotiating table.

Ukraine’s stronger footing also comes as U.S.-mediated talks to strike a peace deal with Moscow have stalled. Trump’s negotiating team, which includes Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, has been preoccupied with the Iran war, bumping Ukraine down its priority list.

But in that time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appears to have risen in President Donald Trump’s estimation as Kyiv has made gains against Russia.

In early July, a barrage of Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure forced Moscow — one of the world’s top fuel exporters — to halt its exports of diesel. The increased frequency of those kinds of targeted attacks has put the Kremlin in a tighter spot, creating what Kyiv has argued is a window of opportunity for Ukraine to leverage its current advantage to end the war.

Republican Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), another member of the intel committee, and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, agreed that intel-sharing between the U.S. and Ukraine has increased at a moment of strategic importance.

“It sure seems like that,” Cornyn said. “Everybody loves a winner and looks like Ukraine has turned the tide.”

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a Democratic armed services committee member, told POLITICO he’s also seen signs of greater communication between Ukraine and the U.S.

“I was in Ukraine in April 2025 and I was there again in July 2026. 
And I detect more confidence in the communication,” Kaine said.

Cooperation from the U.S. has been key to Ukraine’s positive turn in fortune, said George Barros, the director of innovation and open source tradecraft at the hawkish Institute for the Study of War. Trump reportedly approved intelligence sharing for Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure last year, which have been essential to creating a “proper incentive structure” to push Moscow to the negotiating table, Barros noted.

The strikes, he said, were “supercharged,” and became significantly more effective when imbued with intelligence from the Americans, part of a “larger, more coherent strategy for how to actually create real costs.”

And American early warning systems, Barros added, have been alerting Ukrainians to incoming Russian missile attacks since the early days of the war.

The White House did not provide details on whether its intelligence-sharing relationship with Ukraine has expanded, though it stressed that Trump is focused on facilitating an end to the war.

“The President wants this war settled so the senseless killing ends,” said the White House spokesperson in a statement. “The President and his team remain committed to continuing to play a constructive role in ending the war between Russia and Ukraine, and he remains optimistic that we’ll ultimately get a peace deal done.”

The CIA and ODNI did not respond to a request for comment.

Washington also stands to benefit from Kyiv’s intelligence, said John Herbst, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2003-2006 and still maintains contact with officials in the country.

“There’s no doubt of the following: Ukraine has outstanding intelligence on Russia,” he said.

Zelenskyy has sought to put that intelligence to use. With Washington locked in a five-month war against Iran, the Ukrainian president prefaced his July visit to the Oval Office by claiming Kyiv planned to provide Trump with evidence that Russia was aiding Tehran.

“When you talk to Ukrainian intelligence officials, you hear confident insights into what is going on in Moscow, and not just in the Kremlin,” said Stephen Sestanovich, a fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Insights of a sort that justify a truly cooperative and reciprocal sharing arrangement.”

BRUSSELS — The EU’s new biometric border-check system is causing such long delays for summer travelers that some airports are turning to a simple solution: switching it off when they’re overwhelmed by arriving travelers.

The quick fix, which is allowed under EU regulations, wasn’t what was envisioned when the Entry/Exit System was gradually introduced in October and went fully into force on April 10.

And yet, many airports are doing just that.

“When lines form during the busy summer months, the system is shut off to ensure smooth transit at our hubs in Paris and Amsterdam,” Air France-KLM told POLITICO. 

Airline CEOs, border authorities, and airport officials said biometric checks are suspended when border crossings become congested at other hubs, including in Frankfurt, Brussels and Milan.

The EES applies to non-EU citizens entering the 29-country Schengen zone. Instead of heading to a border agent to get passports stamped, passengers have to use an EES kiosk to provide their fingerprints and be photographed — which will be kept on file for three years — but if those aren’t working then the information has to be taken manually.

They then head either to electronic passport gates or to border agents to enter. The goal is to keep track of visa overstays.

“The advantages of the new system for the EU are evident,” said Guillaume Mercier, a Commission spokesperson. “It increases the security of EU citizens and replaces paper stamping with a modern system of registration and checks.”

The Commission said earlier this year that biometric checks allowed authorities to detect identity frauds that would otherwise “likely have gone undetected.”

Many airports, ports, road border crossings and rail terminals have adapted to the new demands, but tourist-heavy locations have seen hours-long waits.

“Connecting flights were missed due to the EU entry system,” Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said on Tuesday.

Under pressure from the travel industry, the Commission granted a waiver for the peak summer season lasting until Sept. 6. The EES regulation “includes the possibility to temporarily suspend the registration of biometrics in case of exceptional circumstances during the summer,” said Mercier.

“We’ve been able to achieve this with German authorities and with Frankfurt Airport because delays were getting too long,” Spohr told reporters. 

This exception applies to all entry points, not just airports.

A British traveler, Rene Colandog, said on Friday he only had to present his passport before boarding a Eurostar train at London St. Pancras last month. Facial scans and fingerprints were not required. 

“I’m OK with this biometric system … as long as it’s for security,” Colandog said before boarding the train from Brussels back to London. 

Teething troubles

The EES was adopted in 2017, but it was delayed for years because border authorities were not ready to handle the additional workload. 

Even now, getting travelers properly registered in the new system still requires significant staffing. Another problem is that the EES is still new, so almost all travelers are registering for the first time — creating additional delays.

“At Milan Malpensa Airport, border control teams currently consist of about 35 people,” said Cristian Sternativo, a border control officer at the Italian airport and local representative of Italy’s Autonomous Police Union. 

To carry out all the checks required by the EES without creating long lines, “at least 10 to 15 more people would be needed during the busiest times,” he added.  

It is “unthinkable” to expect the EES to operate at full capacity with the current level of staffing because the new system “requires more time,” he said.

Even at Brussels Airport — barely 10 kilometers from the EU institutions — the technology is still not fully operational; biometric data collection suspensions started well before the summer under a derogation issued in late March after 600 passengers missed their flights over just 21 hours.

“The Federal Police Border Control may decide to apply this derogation when necessary,” Belgium’s police confirmed this week.

Now, eight EU countries and Switzerland want the summer derogations extended beyond Sept. 6. 

A strict application of the full procedure “would lead to public order issues” because “there are certain peak periods when the current infrastructure isn’t sufficient to accommodate everyone,” Sternativo said.

Security vs. speed

Despite suspending biometric checks, border authorities insist that security isn’t undermined.

“The traveler is always registered in the EES and the required travel document data are entered into the system,” the Belgian federal police said in a written reply, adding that “the security of border checks and compliance with European regulations remain our absolute priority.”

Passenger experiences vary depending on where they enter the EU.

Kathleen Glass, who regularly travels from the U.K. to the EU, waited only about 15 minutes to complete biometric checks at London St. Pancras on Friday morning before boarding a Eurostar train to Brussels.

William, from Edinburgh, who asked not to have his surname published, said biometric checks at a German airport during Christmas took between 40 and 50 minutes.

The ability to suspend biometric collection appears to be keeping the system functioning this summer.

“Although we are early into the summer season, we are not receiving reports of excessive queues,” said Luke Petherbridge, director of public affairs for the Association of British Travel Agents.

The stress over the EES is only a precursor to the next border technology change being planned by Brussels. The bloc’s next goal is the online European Travel Information and Authorization System, which will require travelers from 59 visa-exempt countries to preregister, undergo a security check and pay a small fee before entering Schengen.

ETIAS — similar to systems already in use in the U.K., and the U.S. — was originally supposed to launch in 2021, and then later this year, but is now delayed until 2027.