Asia airports dominate ACI awards
GENEVA – Asian airports dominated the World’s Best Airports survey by the Airports Council International, with South Korea’s Incheon, Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International and Singapore’s Changi named the world’s top three for passenger service.
It was the third year in a row that Asian airports captured the first three positions in the global league table.
Passengers are asked to assess factors like cleanliness, comfort of waiting areas and ease of check-in.
Programme director Craig Bradbrook said, “Service quality should never be viewed as a ‘nice to have’ feature in managing airport services, but as a key discipline in the airport management process. We see a high correlation between management commitment to service and passenger satisfaction.”
Commenting on the Asia Pacific performance sweep, Bradbrook explains, “At Incheon, the management team takes pride in delivering quality airport service and sees it as being part of the overall tourism value chain ” good for their airport and their nation.
“That means that the commitment is given very high priority politically as well as operationally by the airport.
“In Kuala Lumpur, the management team has pursued a “world class service” objective firmly supported by a strategy that puts service quality first and that has dovetailed with Malaysia’s ‘Visit Malaysia 2007’ tourism campaign.
“And the third place winner, Singapore, has pursued a determined objective for 20 years, working hard to build a reputation that has become synonymous with excellence and regularly introducing new services to better serve their passengers.
“These are key factors that ensure year on year top performance levels.”
In Europe the top spot went to Porto in Portugal, in North America to Dallas-Fort Worth, in Africa to Johannesburg, in Latin America to Ecuador’s Guayaquil, and in the Middle East to Israel’s Tel Aviv, ACI said.
A total of 90 airports took part in the survey conducted during 2007, said ACI, which groups 580 members operating 1647 airports in 175 countries.
Incheon also headed the list in the 2006 survey, followed by Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and Changi on level pegging, and Dallas-Fort Worth.
Fourth and fifth in the latest survey were Hong Kong and Japan’s Nagoya, according to ACI.
Incheon and Changi see between 25 million and 40 million travellers pass through, and Hong Kong and Dallas-Fort Worth handle more than 40 million.
Kuala Lumpur processes between 15 million and 20 million.
Ian Jarrett
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