An Air Canada plane at Toronto's Pearson International Airport in 2021. The airline is starting a test project that aims to avoid long waits for decisions on customer claims for compensation.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Air Canada AC-T is trying out a new way to resolve claims for compensation filed by unhappy passengers by using third-party arbitrators, a test project intended to avoid long waits for decisions from the Canadian Transportation Agency.
The airline will ask 500 randomly selected Air Canada customers with outstanding CTA complaints to transfer their cases to an arbitrator, who will provide a ruling in 90 days. Passengers can accept the decision and drop their case at the CTA, or continue to press their complaint with the regulator, which has a backlog of 96,000 complaints. It can take years for the CTA to settle a complaint.
The airline will abide by the arbitrator’s ruling, Marc Barbeau, Air Canada’s chief legal officer, said in an interview on Tuesday.
The pilot project is an attempt to reduce the delays the airline and customers face waiting for decisions from the regulator, and to build trust with passengers, Mr. Barbeau said.
“We have relationships with our customers and sometimes we let them down and sometimes they feel we’ve let them down,” he said. “Being in an ongoing dispute with them is not conducive to turning the page and rebuilding the trust that we want to have with all our customers.”
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The airline will make public the results and will not prevent participants from speaking publicly about their experiences. Questions remain about how to increase the project’s size while retaining its hoped-for efficiencies if the carrier decides to adopt the program, Mr. Barbeau said.
Air Canada designed its pilot project in consultation with Transport Canada and the CTA, and has hired an arbitration company that is certified to do the same work in Europe and Britain. The arbitrator will decide cases using the same rules as the CTA, known as Airline Passenger Protection Regulations.
Those regulations came into force in 2019, and set out the standards of treatment to which airline passengers are entitled when their flights are cancelled or delayed. The rules provide minimum amounts of compensation and care, including food and drink and overnight accommodation. Customers unhappy with their treatment or the airline’s response to their complaint can lodge a complaint at the CTA.
Over the past four years, the CTA has received a yearly average of more than 40,000 complaints covering all airlines that service Canada, including a record 5,685 in January alone, said Jadrino Huot, a CTA spokesman. More than 54 per cent of all decisions have favoured passengers, he said.
Air Canada said it is subject to about 16,000 CTA complaints a year and wins about 75 per cent of them.
“The Canadian Transportation Agency was made aware of this forthcoming initiative by Air Canada and … encourages airlines to find ways to resolve complaints directly with their passengers,” Mr. Huot said.
Transport Canada referred questions to the CTA.
Ian Jack, a spokesman for the Canadian Automobile Association, which operates a large travel agency and advocates for passengers, said Air Canada’s pilot program should reveal its results and case files for its effectiveness to be measured. He noted it is not independently governed, like a similar body for the cable industry.
“It’s too bad it’s come to this,” Mr. Jack said. “The government system has not been working for anybody, including air passengers who face a three-year-plus delay in getting their cases decided.”
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Tahira Dawood, acting general counsel at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Ottawa, said the current system is too slow, even after recent improvements to the decision-making process. She declined to comment on Air Canada’s pilot project because she has yet to see the details or the resulting decisions.
“If there is a new process from airlines or CTA that speeds up the process for consumers who have been waiting for waiting for a really long time, that is going to be useful,” she said by phone.
The federal government has proposed – and shelved – measures aimed at streamlining the CTA complaints resolution process in the past few years, even as the backlog persisted. The CTA, however, has automated and streamlined its process in the past two years, and closes about 33,000 cases a year compared with 11,000 before the changes.
Air Canada’s Mr. Barbeau said the airline is able to resolve the majority of disputes without involving the CTA.
He said the pilot program’s success will not be measured based on wins and losses. “We’re really going to measure it on a host of factors to see whether this is something that can actually be workable and get us to a fair, quick, but equitable resolution,” he said.