If your British Airways flight was delayed or your baggage went missing and the airline brushed you off, there was one route that worked: escalate to CEDR, the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution. Passengers did very well there. Figures from April 2025 to March 2026 show CEDR and BA settlements handed travellers around £5 million in a single year, with passengers winning roughly 73% of cases including pre-decision settlements. BA isn't renewing that contract.
From now on, disputes go to AviationADR, the UK's other major aviation dispute scheme—and its track record looks very different. easyJet made the same jump a few years back, and the numbers tell the story: CEDR sided with passengers 79% of the time in the airline's final six quarters with the scheme, then just 29% in the following six quarters under AviationADR. AviationADR's own explanation is that airlines improved early handling, using law firms to filter out strong claims before escalation, so only weak cases reach adjudication. Skeptics disagree, loudly.
There's another wrinkle worth knowing about. A February 2026 review commissioned by the Civil Aviation Authority flagged that AviationADR gives airlines advance sight of decisions against them—about a week before the passenger sees them—nominally to prepare payment. During that window an airline can raise legal challenges. The reviewer warned this creates an impression of bias and recommended scrapping the practice. CEDR, by contrast, generally used legally qualified adjudicators; AviationADR doesn't require legal qualifications. Meanwhile, BA settled 4,414 complaints before a formal decision in that same year—cases where passengers had to push past the airline's own process just to get an offer.
The commercial logic isn't hard to see. The referee is paid by the airline it judges, and the airline can walk. Ryanair has already played this game, leaving AviationADR in 2018 after adverse rulings over staff strikes and rejoining in 2021. CEDR will stop taking new aviation cases from December 31, and the CAA says it's working with AviationADR on capacity for the incoming caseload. AviationADR defends its independence and notes its decisions are free for consumers.
Why does this matter if you're a traveller? Because when an airline wrongly denies you compensation, the outside adjudicator is often the only realistic option—most people give up before escalating, which is precisely why settlement figures look like a backlog of complaints that shouldn't have been rejected in the first place. If you fly BA and hit problems, expect a lower win rate going forward, and know that if you reject an AviationADR decision you can still take the airline to court. In the meantime, document everything: photos, receipts, timestamps. The passenger who escalates quickly with a clean paper trail still gets paid—just less often than before.
View from the Wing
