Use casesServices

Airline passenger claims

Every delayed, canceled, or overbooked flight brings claims, and each answer depends on the flight's actual times, the cause operations recorded, the distance, and what the passenger was offered.

With the systemEach claim read, the flight's records pulled, the entitlement band computed, the reply drafted; a specialist decides.

Who decides
Customer relations specialist

Web form · 3 November 2026

Passenger claim · delayed flight

My flight from İstanbul to Ankara on 2 November landed almost four hours late; the crew said it was a technical fault. I request the compensation the regulation provides.

→ delay over three hours at the destination; cause code technical

Illustrative The document as it arrives. In red, what the system marks for your expert.

1. The work

Today

  1. ReadClaims arrive by web form, email, call-center notes, and the civil aviation authority's (SHGM) application system; a customer relations specialist reads each one and its attachments and works out the flight, the date, and what the passenger asks for.
  2. GatherThey look up the flight's scheduled and actual times, the delay or cancellation cause code from operations, the booking and its connections, the boarding record, and any baggage file, screen by screen.
  3. ComputeThey work out by hand how late the passenger reached the final destination, the flight's distance and band, when a cancellation was announced, and whether a rerouting or care was offered.
  4. WriteThey write the answer from templates; where operations recorded weather, a security risk, or a strike, they have to show why it counts as an extraordinary circumstance.
  5. DecideThe specialist decides whether compensation, a refund, or care costs are owed, sends the answer, and passes any payment to the airline's payment process; a disputed case goes to operations or legal.

With the system

  1. ReadThe SLM reads each claim and its attachments and returns the claim type (delay, cancellation, denied boarding, downgrade, or baggage), the flight, the date, the booking reference, the request, and flags such as a lawyer or an SHGM application.SLM
  2. GatherThe agent sends the claim down a fixed path by its type and gathers, read-only, the flight's times, the cause code, the booking, the boarding record, and the baggage file into one claim file; baggage claims go to the baggage team's path.Agentic AI
  3. ComputeYour written rules, run as code, compute the delay at the final destination, the distance band, when the passenger was told, and what was offered, and look up the entitlement in your table; whether extraordinary circumstances apply is never computed: it is flagged for a person.Your rule
  4. WriteThe SLM drafts the reply in your format and the passenger's language, citing the regulation's article and the flight's own records; an extraordinary circumstance appears only as operations recorded it, with that record attached.SLM
  5. DecideThe customer relations specialist checks the draft against the file and decides, as before; a disputed extraordinary circumstance goes to operations and legal, and any payment goes only through your payment process.Person decides

What lands on the desk

The specialist gets the claim with the flight's own times, cause code, booking, and boarding record already pulled, the delay and band computed by your rules, and a reply drafted with the article cited. Nothing is paid or refused by the system; the specialist decides and sends.

FIG. 1 · Claim file and reply draftIllustrative
Delay claim · domestic flight · 02.11.2026 · web formİstanbul to Ankara, arrived late

SLM · the claim

  • TypeDelay; compensation and a meal receipt claimed
  • AttachmentsBoarding pass and a meal receipt
  • FlagsNone

Agent · the flight's records

  • TimesArrived well over three hours after scheduleflight operations
  • CauseTechnical: an aircraft defectdelay code
  • BookingDirect flight; Ankara the final destinationreservations
  • BoardingPassenger boarded the delayed flightdeparture control

Code · entitlement

  • metDelay at the final destination of three hours or more
  • Banddomestic
  • Cause recorded as technical; no extraordinary circumstance put forward
  • Refreshments at the gatein the operations record

SLM · reply draft

Draft in your format: compensation under the domestic band with the article cited, the meal receipt handled under your care policy; ready for the specialist.

  • SLM
  • Agent
  • Code

Why a person decidesWhether compensation is owed, and any claim of extraordinary circumstances, are the specialist's; payment goes only through your payment process.

DecidesCustomer relations specialist

2. The system

For your technical team — skip it if you like.

How it works

In

  • Web forms and emails
  • SHGM applications
  • Boarding passes and receipts, scanned

  1. SLM · reasons

    Claim reader

    SLM fine-tuned on your claims and their types

    Reads

    • Everything under In

    Out

    • Claim type and request
    • Flight, date, and booking reference
    • Flags: lawyer, SHGM, press

  2. Agent · acts

    Claim-routing agent

    Router; gathers the flight's records read-only

    Reads

    • The read claim

    Out

    • A path by claim type
    • Actual times and the cause code
    • Booking, connections, and boarding record
    • Baggage claims to the baggage team

  3. Code · calculates

    Entitlement calculator

    Your written rules and table, run as code; no model

    Reads

    • Scheduled and actual times
    • Route and final destination
    • Notice and rerouting records

    Out

    • Delay at the final destination
    • Distance by the great-circle method
    • The regulation's band and your entitlement
    • Extraordinary-circumstance claims flagged

  4. SLM · reasons

    Reply drafter

    SLM, in your reply formats, Turkish and English

    Reads

    • The claim file and the band
    • Your approved regulation texts
    • Your conditions of carriage

    Out

    • A reply draft citing the article
    • The flight's records attached
    • Points of doubt marked

  5. Decision

    Customer relations specialist

    Reads

    • The claim file and the reply draft

    Out

    • Decides what is owed and sends the reply
    • Payment only through your payment process
    • Disputed cases to operations and legal
How the agent's work is arrangedRouter

Router

The first component already says what kind of claim it is, so the agent only sends each one down a fixed path (entitlement, baggage, or straight to the specialist) and gathers that path's records.

How the models are trained and tested

Your expert writes the test first. A step the test does not need is skipped, and we say why.

Show the training steps

Small language model (SLM)

  1. Test set

    200–400 past claims with the replies your senior specialists accepted, graded for facts, the article cited, and tone, in Turkish and English.

  2. Dataset

    Past claims, their files, and the final replies; passenger data masked in training copies where the test allows.

  3. Continued pre-training (CPT)Skipped

    Skipped: the task needs no field language the base model lacks; fine-tuning teaches your claim types and formats.

  4. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT)

    On reading claims and their attachments, and on your reply formats for each claim type.

  5. Reinforcement learning (RL)Skipped

    Skipped: the reply format is taught by fine-tuning, and the entitlement comes from the code, so no further reward is needed.

  6. Retrieval

    Retrieval supplies the regulation texts your legal team approves, your conditions of carriage, and your reply templates, so a rule change never needs retraining; times, distances, and bands come from the code, never from the model.

  7. Monitoring

    The specialist reviews every draft; each correction joins the next test.

Where the agentic system stops

The customer relations specialist decides whether compensation, a refund, or care costs are owed and sends every reply; a disputed extraordinary circumstance goes to operations and legal.

Show its tools, limits, and record
Tools and access
Reads flight operations (actual times and delay codes), the reservation system, departure control (boarding records), baggage tracing records, and the CRM; read-only; writes only the claim file and the reply draft.
May not
Pay or promise a payment, deny a claim, decide that an extraordinary circumstance applies, send a reply, contact the passenger, change a booking or any record, or grant itself any access.
Who decides and the written limit
Customer relations specialistThe customer relations specialist decides whether compensation, a refund, or care costs are owed and sends every reply; a disputed extraordinary circumstance goes to operations and legal. The system never pays, never refuses a claim, never decides that an extraordinary circumstance applies, and never contacts the passenger; any payment goes only through your payment process.
Stops when
A cause code put forward as an extraordinary circumstance, missing or conflicting times, a connection on another carrier, a lawyer, a court, an SHGM application, or low reading confidence: the file goes to the specialist, marked.
Record
Every source read, the path taken, the times and the cause code, the rule and table versions, the computed band, each draft, and who decided and sent.

How agentic systems stay inside limits

3. Value and conditions

Where the time goes, and what your institution will measure.

Where the value comes from

  1. Answers sent well inside the response window.
  2. Fewer wrong entitlements, in either direction.
  3. Fewer claims that go on to SHGM after the airline's answer.
  4. Specialist time kept for the disputed cases.

What your institution measures

  • Time from claim to answer
  • Answers sent within the window
  • Claims taken to SHGM after the answer
  • Entitlement errors found in audits
  • Specialist time per claim
Published elsewhere
Since March 2025, the digital application system has handled 30,750 passenger-rights applications electronically, the Minister of Transport and Infrastructure said.

Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure (Ulaştırma ve Altyapı Bakanlığı), 21 February 2026

Measured in the Decision Blueprint

Today's time from claim to answer and specialist time per claim, from your CRM, set the baseline; your airline sets the target.

Conditions

The rules, the data, and the known error, with its guard.

  • Where a flight is delayed for technical and operational reasons and the passenger reaches the final destination three hours or more late, the carrier must meet its compensation and refund-or-rerouting duties at once (SHY-YOLCU art. 7/3, added in the Resmî Gazete of 10 December 2024); compensation is set for domestic flights and for three international distance bands, measured by the great-circle method (art. 8/1 and 8/5). Your table holds the amounts; this page prints none.
  • For a cancellation, no compensation is owed if the carrier proves that extraordinary circumstances caused it despite all measures (art. 6/4); the regulation names political instability, weather unsuitable for the flight, natural disasters, security risks, unexpected flight-safety shortcomings, and strikes (art. 4). That call stays with operations and legal, never with the model.
  • The carrier bears the burden of proving whether and when the passenger was told of a cancellation (art. 6/5), so the agent pulls the notice records into every cancellation file.
  • Applications made through SHGM's system go first to the airline, which has thirty days to assess and answer them (Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, 21 February 2026). EU passenger rules apply to the flights they cover and are cited only from the texts your legal team approves.

Start here

We take a month of claims with your customer relations team, time each step from arrival to answer, check how many your table already answers, and test the claim reader on your own claims before anything is built.

Who builds it Every engagement is led by an engineer who has built machine-learning models that real decisions run on since 2012, and language models and agentic systems in production since 2024. About eqlx

Request a Decision BlueprintWhat the Decision Blueprint covers

Equalize the gap.

Bring work that takes expertise. Leave knowing the first step.

A short description of the work is enough; no confidential records.

  1. You send a short descriptionNo confidential records, credentials, or production data
  2. The engineer checks whether it fits, and what it would needA model, a small language model, an agent, or none
  3. A proposed first step, or an honest “not a fit”A technical conversation with the engineer
Start with a Decision BlueprintTalk to the engineer

https://eqlx.ai/use-cases/passenger-claims · Printed copy; the website is the current version.