One Sky Solutions Takes-Off With Innovative Approach To Assist Airlines In Dealing With Their Growing Volumes Of EU261 And Montreal Convention Passenger Claims

Transcript

Jim Callaghan:Well, we're delighted to be launching One Sky Solutions here at the CAPA World Aviation Summit event in Malta. And what we're dealing with is a huge problem for airlines, which are EU 261 claims and Montreal Convention claims, which are costing airlines millions, hundreds of millions of euros Hundreds of millions of euros per annum. And what OSS does is we provide a platform through which the airlines can send all of their passenger complaints through the system, and it gets to either a call center if it's a pre-court action, or our network of 16 law firms around Europe. And what this is providing for the airlines is huge synergies. Instead of having to deal with 28 different law firms, It provides one source. What it does for the law firms is similarly provides a huge amount of efficiencies which allows them to offer very competitive rates to the airlines. And so for the airlines, it's saving costs, it's improving customer loyalty, and we also have data that they can feed through to their operations people to avoid these kind of incidents in the future. So we're really delighted to be here at CAPA And we invite all airlines that have a problem in this area, and pretty much any airline flying to Europe has this problem, to come and visit us, and hopefully we can help you to solve this problem. A lot of times what happens is the airlines are so swamped with the huge volume of these claims that they're not able to respond to passengers in a timely manner, and passengers tend to get irate when they think they're being ignored by the airline, and generally will go to a claims management company who will then take between 40% and 50% of the claim for simply writing a letter to the airline. And so what the OSS system does is it enables the airline to deal with the problem in a timely manner. By sending it through the OSS system, we can respond within 72 hours. If it's something that needs to be settled, we can advise the airline in the most cost-effective means of settling it, and if it's one that can be defended in court, that's something that our network of 16 law firms can help them with. Yeah, unfortunately the EU 261 regulation has been broadened, the scope of it has been broadened hugely since it was passed 14 years ago, so there's a huge scope of both delays and cancellations that are subject to this legislation. The problem is that it's still very unclear in certain areas whether you have to pay or you don't have to pay, and that's where this service comes into its own in terms of giving the airlines a quick answer as to whether you have to pay or whether you should defend it in court. Well, we're hoping that it gives the airline this central point that they can send their claims to instead of having to deal with potentially 28 different law firms and getting 28 different invoices, having no real transparency over this piece. The OAS system cuts through all of that, and by having a system which provides reports to the airlines enables them to, at the press of a button, see what their total exposure is to EU 261, and also, as we said, use this data to improve their operations. Yeah, I mean, it's difficult It's very difficult to have specific numbers, but certainly the experience of the law firms that are in our network, I mean, it's thousands of claims per week in some cases. I mean, the courts are completely clogged with these cases, and the numbers are hideous in terms of the amounts of money being sucked out of the airlines, not only for the claims themselves, but then you have the litigation costs and other claims costs on top of that. So it's a massive amount for airlines. Yeah, I think it certainly does impact on the level of cases going through the courts. By having better information as to whether it makes sense to defend or not in particular jurisdictions, it saves airlines money on litigation costs that are otherwise lost.

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