Hong Kong ( CNN ) -- A nearly 9-hour flight delay turned into a standoff at Hong Kong airport Wednesday , with passengers refusing to leave the plane for 5-hours until the airline agreed to higher compensation . The incident underscores just how high tensions can rise in modern air travel with passengers and airlines jockeying it out in a low-frill , high-fee world . There is no global standard for passenger compensation in the case of airline delays and wide gulf can exist between passenger expectations and airline offers . When Hong Kong Airlines flight 752 from Singapore arrived at 530 a.m. Wednesday morning , the airline says 80 passengers refused to get off . The travelers , mainly members of package tours from mainland China , demanded the airline increase the original compensation offer of $ 50 per passenger . Twenty-one of the passengers stayed on board for another five hours , requesting reimbursement for the unused hotel rooms they had paid for the night before . The airport police were called in to negotiate and the passengers finally at 10:25 a.m. , after the airline agreed to pay them $ 150 . Hong Kong 's I-Cable News quoted one passenger who said it was n't the money , but the attitude of the airline that irked them . This is n't the first such incident in Hong Kong . The Standard newspaper reported in February that a group of Mainland tourists staged an all-night protest in the airport over flight delays . Hong Kong Airlines spokesperson Eva Chan blamed the incident on cultural differences . `` Our air staff never had any bad attitude towards the passenger , '' she said . `` They tried to negotiate and explain that the compensation policy of HK airlines is different from mainland Chinese airlines . '' The irate travelers would likely have been better off if they had been traveling within the European Union . The EU requires passengers be compensated between $ 330 and $ 800 if their flight is delayed by two hours or more , depending on the flight length . However , the airline can claim exclusion for `` extraordinary circumstances , '' including weather and security incidences . The United States has no federal regulation on delay compensation , but it has instituted regulations that penalize airlines if passengers are stuck in a plane on the tarmac for more than three hours . The Department Transportation just fined an American Airlines ' subsidiary $ 900,000 , in the first penalty since the regulations went into effect last year .
A nearly 9-hour flight delay turned into a standoff at Hong Kong airport Wednesday . Passengers refusing to leave the plane for 5-hours until the airline agreed to pay .