The Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA), which serves as the national transportation regulator and also as mediator for claims filed by passengers against airlines, has revealed it does not keep track of the outcomes of nearly all of the complaints filed.
That means it can’t say how many are resolved in favour of either pax or airline - or what, if any, compensation was awarded - or actually issued.
A report in the Globe & Mail points out that the CTA has said it doesn’t track 97 per cent of claim outcomes. That’s because, as CTA execs explained to MP’s during parliamentary inquiries into travel meltdowns, that the agency uses “informal” resolution techniques to resolve almost all complaints.
Only about 3 per cent of claims by pax against airlines end up going through a formal adjudication process via the agency. Those outcomes are published - the rest are not.
As the Globe concludes, that means the public has no information about “how often air passengers with legitimate complaints are having their rights upheld.”
Furthermore, it quotes the CTA’s director general, Tom Oommen, saying that the informally-reached resolutions are often private, and the agency has no way of “compelling airlines or passengers to tell us if they’ve settled a dispute between themselves without us.”
The CTA dispute resolution process is coming under increased scrutiny as complaints against airlines as a result of holiday travel chaos are ballooning and the agency is reporting an ever-increasing backlog, despite a big boost in government funding last fall.
The CTA is now looking at a backlog in excess of 36,000 complaints as Open Jaw reports, and a timeline of over 18 months to open a new file - let alone resolve it.
Passenger rights advocates point out that a passenger is not even able to file a complaint with the CTA until they have already made a claim with the airline and already waited 30 days for a resolution.
As it stands, passengers are looking at nearly 20 months from any airline incident for any “facilitation” of a resolution to take place - during which time, passengers can close their complaint, whether or not they’ve accepted a solution or merely abandoned pursuing the process. Those are considered ‘informally’ resolved - whether any resolution has actually taken place.
Only if a passenger refuses to accept an airline offer, will a complaint be elevated to formal dispute resolution within the CTA, and thereby have its outcome tracked.
Consumer rights advocates say the CTA’s system’s flaws in both timely processing as well as reporting outcomes tilt the scales against passengers who may abandon the lengthy and complicated process long before receiving compensation they are legally entitled to, and in favour of airlines who can simply wait the process out to avoid having to compensate affected pax.
