When I signed up for the Royal Aeronautical Society
Air Law Lecture last week, I was a little concerned by the title ‘New EU Frameworks for
Consumer Complaints’ – it didn’t sound too riveting… Ho-hum, at least there was
the Summer Reception on the terrace afterwards. Actually it turned out to be
very interesting!
It didn’t start so well, with the MC and the lecturer rabitting on about ‘ADR’, when I didn’t have a clue what that was. However, once it was explained that we were talking about ‘alternative dispute resolution’ things became clearer. It seems that our legal systems are failing consumers because they are too slow and too expensive, not least because there lurks the threat of ‘loser pays’. Some industries have established alternative systems for managing consumer complaints (CDR is consumer dispute resolution) but airlines do not have a pan-European or better still a global system of recourse for complaints.
We were told that the Nordic countries have used ADR to replace the legal systems for dispute resolution for many years, in just about every sphere of business but the rest of Europe is lagging behind. There are reasonable concerns about the cost of running ADR, about it becoming excessively customer biased and around the appeals process but in most cases the arbitration/mediation/ombudsman systems that have been adopted have actually saved money. The ideal apparently is a fire-and-forget process, where the consumer registers his/her complaint on-line (ODR) and the ombudsman does all the rest.
It didn’t start so well, with the MC and the lecturer rabitting on about ‘ADR’, when I didn’t have a clue what that was. However, once it was explained that we were talking about ‘alternative dispute resolution’ things became clearer. It seems that our legal systems are failing consumers because they are too slow and too expensive, not least because there lurks the threat of ‘loser pays’. Some industries have established alternative systems for managing consumer complaints (CDR is consumer dispute resolution) but airlines do not have a pan-European or better still a global system of recourse for complaints.
We were told that the Nordic countries have used ADR to replace the legal systems for dispute resolution for many years, in just about every sphere of business but the rest of Europe is lagging behind. There are reasonable concerns about the cost of running ADR, about it becoming excessively customer biased and around the appeals process but in most cases the arbitration/mediation/ombudsman systems that have been adopted have actually saved money. The ideal apparently is a fire-and-forget process, where the consumer registers his/her complaint on-line (ODR) and the ombudsman does all the rest.
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