A family buys four tickets, arrives at the airport on time, and gets told at the counter that the flight was oversold: there is no room for all four. They did not arrive late, they did not change plans. The airline sold their seat to someone else.
What Article 52 requires
When an airline sells more tickets than the aircraft holds and that ends in denied boarding, Article 52 of Mexico’s Ley de Aviacion Civil gives the passenger three options to choose from: a refund of the ticket price (or the unused portion of the trip), substitute transport on the next available flight with meals during the wait and lodging if an overnight stay is needed, or transport on whatever later date suits them to the same destination. Under the first and third options, the law sets compensation at no less than 25% of the ticket price or of the unused portion: that is not an airline courtesy, it is a legal floor.
The ruling that closed the easy way out
Until 2023, that 25% disappeared if the passenger took the second option, substitute transport with meals and lodging covered. Mexico’s Supreme Court First Chamber ruled on amparo directo en revision 401/2023 (made public in July of that year) and declared that exclusion unconstitutional. The case behind it involved a family that lost their connections in Europe in 2017 because of an overbooked flight. Since that ruling, choosing the option with lodging and meals no longer cancels the right to collect the compensation.
Why treating it like just another delay gets expensive
We already covered how a flight delay needs its own real-time trigger, separate from the itinerary’s scheduled stages. Overbooking is another event with its own logic, and it is not the same as a passenger who does not show up to board: there the decision was the passenger’s, here it was the airline’s. If the profile that triggers communication with that passenger does not distinguish denied boarding from an ordinary delay, two things go wrong: the counter staff only applies the compensation if the passenger asks for it in the moment, and many do not know about the 25% floor, and the follow-up afterward treats them like any other traveler, when they just lost a connection over a commercial decision the airline made, not weather or air traffic.
Flagging the event inside the same system that triggers communication does two things at once: it lets the airline calculate and offer the minimum compensation without the passenger having to know the law, and it activates a different follow-up than an ordinary delay with that same traveler, instead of letting the next win-back campaign talk to them as if nothing happened.