Following the frequent complaints of flights delays and cancellations and seemingly lack for proper feedback from regulation agencies and airlines, the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), has set up a Consumer Protection Department Portal.
The porter is designed to collate passengers’ complaints, investigate, resolve issues and disseminate to airlines involved in due time to resolve the problems.
NCAA’s Director of Public Affairs and Consumer Protection, Mr. Michael Achimugu, said the portal, which is fully automated and ready for operations will help the NCAA consumer protection staff in collating and analysing complaints faster.
Achimugu who represented the Acting Director General of NCAA, Capt. Chris Najomo stated this at the training of the staff at the NCAA headquarters in Abuja on Wednesday, saying the focus of the administration is to achieve the ease of doing business while noting that the portal will make the complains of the passengers easy to address.
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“Data collection has been a major issue in Nigeria. Handling any aviation issues cannot 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 stressing that airlines involved will be seeing passengers’ problems and resolve them immediately.
He however, noted that all complaints can be resolved immediately as some will require investigation before feedback.
He added 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 longer time for resolution.
Abdulmalik said with the portal, the airlines will also view the complaints in real time as they are log in from different parts of the world which will make them act faster and resolve the problems quicker.
One of the participants, Amarachukwu Onoh said the training will 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,” Onoh said.
