The conciliation board for travel and transport, the Schlichtungsstelle Reise & Verkehr, received more complaints about delays and cancellations of flight and train journeys in the first half of the year than ever before: in the six months up to the end of June, around 29,000 applications for conciliation reached the board, a record high so far, it announced on Saturday. Four out of five conciliation applications concern flights.
Around 24,000 conciliation requests concerned the flight sector, which was 83 percent of all applications, the board said. Causes included extreme weather conditions, strikes, and restrictions due to the Iran war.
Around 4,000 fell within the rail sector, which was 14 percent. Here, deficiencies in infrastructure were often the cause, according to the mediation service. The remainder of the applications concerned tour operators, local public transport, long-distance bus travel, and ship journeys.
The number of mediation requests, totaling around 29,000 in the first half of the year is more than 50 percent above the corresponding periods in each of the two previous years. Unlike usual, the applications also did not decline from February to June, in previous years, the board received the most complaints around the turn of the year and after the summer months.
The mediation service suspects the reason is the significantly increased use of artificial intelligence: consumers can find the mediation service more easily and are therefore more likely to use it.
Consumers can turn to the conciliation board if they have tried unsuccessfully to reach an agreement with a company in a dispute. Thirty lawyers specialising in passenger and travel law then examine, free of charge, whether claims such as compensation exist. A precondition is that the company is a member of the conciliation board.
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