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.
This follows the frequent complaints of flight delays and cancellations and the seeming lack of proper feedback from regulation agencies and airlines.
The portal, which is fully automated and ready for operations will help the NCAA consumer protection staff in collating and analyzing 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 the 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 cannot be completed 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 them 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 determines how fast cases can be resolved. In the end, there are unforeseen circumstances that can cause cases to be delayed 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.