Snapshot of Aviation cases from the last 12 months
Report date: 5/3/2023
- How many new cases received = 46,281
- How many completed case = 44,783
- How many determinations = 31,953
- How many settled by the Airline prior to a determination = 1,654
- How many spurious or out of scope cases = 11,171
- How many cases currently over 90 days in the determination status = 0
- Cases still in progress waiting information from either Airlines or passengers = 13,322
- Passengers waiting for agreed compensation payments from Airlines = 2,588
- Number of complaints about Aviation ADR that have been escalated to the independent assessor = 1
- Number of complaints about Aviation ADR that have been escalated to the CAA = 63 (0.22% of cases received)
- Current amount of cases in the system = 25,809
- Average time to complete a determination following the receipt of all evidence from the Airline and passenger = 86 days
Cases can take up to 6 months to fully process as follows:
Cases in the initial assessment period can take up to 3 weeks to establish all the information for the case to be in scope, the average time for a case in this assessment period is 2 – 5 days.
At this point it is important to establish the number of passengers on a case, if there is more than one, we request that a signed letter of authority (LOA) is submitted to us for each additional passenger. If LOAs are not provided, this will delay the progression of the case as we are unable to proceed without signed permission.
The next stage is for the Airline to assess the claim and submit their response and supporting evidence to us. They have 28 days in which to do this, however, there are instances where the Airline will request an extension to this timeframe, usually due to the case being more complex, or as a result of the volume of cases that they are handling.
Once we have received all the information from both parties, the case is re-assessed and if everything is in order, we progress the case to Adjudication and allocate a qualified adjudicator to the case.
We then have a 90-day period in which to complete a determination on the case. On rare occasions a case may be extremely complex and may require more time, if this is the case all parties are notified.
After the completion of the determination, if the case is found in favour of the passenger and compensation is awarded, the passenger is asked for their bank details for payment. It is then the responsibility of the Airline to make this payment. Once we have received the bank details the Airline then has 30 days to make the payment. If this payment is not made within this timeframe, we chase the payment on the passenger’s behalf. If the payment is still not made, this will be reported to the CAA in a monthly report.
It should be noted that the above stats and figures are a snapshot of the Aviation System as of 05/03/2024. When these stats are compared to the Quarterly CAA Reports, they may not align or be able to be accurately compared, as this snapshot shows the status of all cases on the portal, unlike the CAA Quarterly Report which only shows cases which have either been opened or closed within the given quarter and thus may be outdated by the time it is published and it may not display all aspects of an ADR provider’s work.
Our process follows guidelines and regulations set out by CTSI and the CAA, these are two Government departments, which we are approved by in order to operate our ADR schemes.
Company overview for the past 12 months
In the past eight years of Aviation ADR’s approval we have dealt with over 181,000 Aviation cases. We started off with a small group of qualified Adjudicators and Administration staff to deal with approximately 250 cases per month. This has built up over time, to an average of 3900 cases per month. At the end of 2021 there was a massive unexpected spike of Aviation complaints, fuelled mainly by passengers returning to flying and holidays abroad, following the pandemic and Airlines not being fully staffed to enable them to cope with the increase in traffic and passenger loads. This was a sudden unexpected increase in volume for us and we were then tasked with having to implement onboarding of new staff, improvements to our software to make the process more efficient, introduction of new processes in training and quality control. This was achieved over the months following the spike, unfortunately to the detriment of a number of cases, which were delayed in progressing through our process. We went from an average of just 3- 4% of cases going over our 90-day adjudication timeframe, to 16% for one period. We are happy to report that we have now recovered from the spike and the last quarter reported us being back to the 4% threshold.
We are now very confident that we can significantly improve on this over the next two quarters, due to the number of highly trained and dedicated Adjudicators and Administration Support that we now have in place. This coupled with upgrades that we have implemented within our software, improved processes, training processes, training support, quality control and management structure.
We will shortly be releasing a brand-new state of the art platform for processing Aviation complaints, this has been in development for the past eight months. We have developed a number of tried and tested algorithms to aid the process, along with a whole new process to speed up the time it takes to complete a case. This investment has been built upon our unique insight of the industry, the data of over 181,000 cases and our experience of implementing the regulations to sometimes extremely complex cases.
Quality control board
We are also expanding our quality control by introducing a quality control board to oversee processes and staff performance.
With all these enhancements to our systems, staff and processes, the next twelve months will prove to be outstanding for us.
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