Regional airline declares bankruptcy, customers may not get refunds | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

While airline bankruptcy news in the U.S. have been dominated by Silver Airways and Spirit Airlines (SAVE) , a number of smaller airlines from around the world have also struggled to the point of having to stop operations over the last year.

Founded as a charter and cargo airline meant to link the Western European nation with China, Air Belgium was accruing annual losses of €22 million (roughly $24 million USD) at the time it filed for bankruptcy protection and was ordered to go into liquidation.

Other global airlines to declare bankruptcy in 2025 include Brazil’s Azul Linhas Aereas (AZUL) and Bavarian air taxi manufacturer Lilium.

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‘The fairest solution for protecting the interests of creditors’

The latest airline to officially be declared bankrupt is the Romanian low-cost carrier Blue Air Aviation S.A. Once among the most popular by total passengers carried in the Eastern European nation, Blue Air was founded in 2004 and at its peak served 75 destinations across 21 countries — particularly popular routes included flights between Bucharest and French cities such as Paris, Lyon and Nice.

The carrier first entered insolvency proceedings in March 2023 and, after a period during which it looked for investors while the bankruptcy court considered claims from creditors, the airline was officially declared bankrupt two years later in June 2025. Infinexa, the Romanian company which was tasked with navigating the proceedings, said that mounting losses and debts made keeping the company afloat unviable.

“Bankruptcy is the fairest solution for protecting the interests of creditors in the current context and is intended to maximize the chances of debt recovery,” Radu Tudor, senior partner at Infinexa assigned to oversee the liquidation of Blue Air, said in a statement.

The main creditors that will need to be repaid with any funds freed up as a result of liquidation are the Romanian Ministry of Finance and local tax authority ANAF that nationalized Blue Air when it first filed for bankruptcy protection — at the time when Blue Air suspended operations in September 2022, many travelers with suddenly canceled flights reported not receiving any communication around refunds or rebookings.

Blue Air is a Romanian low-cost airline that ceased operations in 2022.

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Looking for a refund from a bankrupt airline? Here is why you may be out of luck

“My flight for the next day was canceled from Santorini to Bucharest due to Blue Air’s bankruptcy issues,” one traveler wrote in the /Flights forum on Reddit in September 2022. “This meant I needed to rebook another ticket the day after that was three times as expensive.”

More on travel and bankruptcy:

When an airline reaches a stage of bankruptcy at which it is forced to cease operations or liquidate, it usually has many millions in debts that it owes to banks, aircraft manufacturers and airports. Individual travelers are considered unsecured creditors that are at the very bottom of the repayment list and so are unlikely to ever see refunds unless they go through their credit card company or travel agency.

When German tour giant FTI Touristik GmbH suddenly shut down and canceled over 175,000 tours earlier this year, many of the travel agencies that booked trips called EU lawmakers to better regulate situations in which the agency has to compensate losses when a company it worked with abruptly shuts down.