Flight Cancellation: NCAA Launches Complaints Automation Portal

Following the frequent complaints of flights delays and cancellations and seemly lack for proper feedback from regulation agencies and airlines, the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), has set up a Consumer Protection Department Portal to collate passengers’ complaints, investigate, resolve issues and disseminate to airlines involved in due time to resolve the problems.

The portal, which is fully automated and ready for operations will help the NCAA consumer protection staff in collating and analysing complaints faster.

Speaking at the training of the staff at the NCAA headquarters in Abuja on Wednesday, the director of public affairs and consumer protection, NCAA, Michael Achimugu, who represented the acting director general, NCAA, Capt. Chris Najomo said the focus of this administration is to achieve ease of doing business and this portal will make the complaints of the passengers easy to address.

He further said “Data collection has been a major issue in Nigeria. Handling any aviation issues can not be complete without proper data collection. This portal will afford all stakeholders the opportunities to see and share data collected for proper action.”

Speaking on how fast complaints can be resolved on the platform, Achimugu said the portal brings transparency and airlines involved will be seeing passengers’ problems and trying to resolve it immediately.

He however, noted that not all complaints can be resolved immediately as some will require investigation before feedback, noting that “some cases are easier to resolve than others and also, the airlines involved in the case also determines how fast cases can be resolved. At the end, there are unforeseen circumstances that can make cases to delay before resolving it”

Speaking further, one of the brains behind the project, Ifueko Abdulmalik said the portal was initiated to simplify the process of resolving complaints as manual processing was taking a longer time.

She also said the airlines are also seeing the complaints as they are logged in from different parts of the world and this will make them act faster and resolve the problems quicker.

Also while speaking on the training, one of the participants at the training, Amarachukwu Onoh said “the training make his work easier, faster and more effective. Right now, we do online and offline and now, everything will be in one portal and we will operate from same portal, which will be easy for tracking. Before now, we had the challenge of having 50 to 100 emails of complaints coming in and it becomes difficult to track and resolve but with this portal, this challenge will become a thing of the past.”