EC261 compensation is a 4 billion dollars market every year. This represents more than 300 million for big airlines such as Ryanair. No surprise hundreds of players are trying to get a piece of that cake. We, unfortunately, have been one of them for a few months, but quickly came back to our senses.
During our short experience as a claim company, we quickly realised airlines handle claims in very different ways.
Some carriers are trying to make the processes smooth and easy for everyone. On the other end, other players have worked really hard on finding ways to annoy us as much as possible (and succeeded).
Therefore, I decided to give you 7 tips (perfect for your customer service and legal agent) which should reduce drastically the payment you make to claim companies in general.
Doing so, airlines should be able to collect customer satisfaction through direct resolution with the passenger and empower travellers to get the full compensation they are entitled to.
1. Claim deposit form
Easy things first. Big Claim companies have developed scripts that will auto-fill in the claim form on the airline’s website. This is a huge gain of time (and money) for them. Therefore, install Google ReCaptcha. It is free and very easy to integrate and will probably make them lose their minds.
On top of that, you should make the claim personal — meaning every passenger will need his own claim and you will only pay one compensation per reference number.
In order to make sure they struggle hard, ask for the last 4 digits of the credit card that was used for payment. You can be sure it will be hard for them to collect that data from travellers.
Bonus idea: put a text field limited to 100 characters 😎
2. Bypass the Claim Company
Every time you get a claim from a specialized company, automatically send a message to your client explaining him the benefits of claiming directly without a third party (no commission, faster processes, commercial offer in vouchers etc.) Explain to them their period of withdrawal and we believe you could get a 20% cancellation rate from this action.
You also have no legal obligation to answer the claim company, therefore I would advice replying directly to the end customer. That will surely increase the duration of the total procedure and make sure the claim company does not have all the right pieces of information to handle the claim efficiently.
3. Make Tracking Hard Again
You need to be aware Claim Companies are filling in the claim form multiple times in a row for each airline. Therefore you should send the confirmation reference number in a tricky way (some airlines actually do it already). Make sure you never mention the name of the client in the confirmation email, and send them randomly (one straight away, one 2 hours later etc…) in order to confuse them on which reference is for which client.
On your following answers, make sure to only use this reference number. It will then be very hard for the claim company to properly follow the claims and handle them fastly.
Do you want to go even further?
2 bonus tips for your answers:
- Always answer in the local language of your airline, probabilities are the agent will struggle to understand, and obviously reply.
- Do not allow them to directly answer to your email. Make sure they need to go back to your online form, put in the reference number and answer directly on your website.
4. Leverage jurisdiction
Most claim company players are local ones, even though a couple of big ones try to act globally. Therefore you should benchmark (or get this benchmark from a really nice guy that could send it to you 😎) all claim companies and define in which country they have lawyers and are capable to actually keep on going with legal processes.
This will allow you to never pay a compensation to a player that is not capable to keep on going with legal processes.
5. Ask for the right proofs
Documents are quite hard to get from travellers. They worry about their personal data and it brings onboard a lot of friction.
Therefore you should always:
- Ask for the family record book whenever a passenger is underage. Some airlines already argue that 2 people living at the same address, and sharing the same family name do not obviously mean they are your legal representative.
- Never pay a delay compensation without receiving the proof that the passenger was on board (boarding pass, luggage tag etc..) Recent case laws have established it was the passenger responsibility to prove he was really there. As it is something quite hard to do, you should definitely be inflexible on this matter.
- Refuse electronic signature. Yes, it is receivable in court but only under certain criteria. The one you should always ask for (because it is unlikely they will be able to provide it) is the electronic certification of the provider they used to do the electronic signature. It exists, but because it is quite expensive, most players do not use a certified widget.
6. Know the law and use it efficiently
Article 7.2 of the EC261 Regulation can be leveraged in a powerful way even though almost no airline pays attention to this detail.
For all delays or cancellation:
If the arrival time does not exceed the scheduled arrival time of the flight originally booked
(a) by two hours, in respect of all flights of 1 500 kilometres or less
(b) by three hours, in respect of all intra-Community flights of more than 1 500 kilometres and for all other flights between 1 500 and 3 500 kilometres
(c ) by four hours, in respect of all flights not falling under (a) or (b)
The operating air carrier may reduce the compensation provided for in paragraph 1 by 50 %.
Pay attention and stop paying double what you should be paying.
7. Payment processes
You can be tricky in your payment processes, and you have various options to make sure claim companies lose their minds:
- Every time you accept to pay a compensation, ask for a payment receipt manually signed by every member of the claim. They will then officially accept your offer and renounce potential other legal procedures.
- You can then decide to post a cheque directly to the passenger in order to short-circuit the claim company and empower travellers to keep 100% of the compensation.
- If you do not like using paper because you care about our beautiful planet, you can use bank transfer to pay the claim company. Something fun to do is to forget to put the reference number. They will struggle quite hard to find whose payment it was or call your paid number to try and get some more details.
We came back from the dark side of the force and are willing to empower you to stop it: FOR GOOD.
U.W
Upcoming articles:
-10 Feedbacks from travellers to Airlines and OTAs
- 10 Best Airline practises to increase their NPS
- Limits of actual travel insurance products
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