With footfall spike, airport sees slide in service ranking
Times of India | 8 February 2025
12 Kolkata: The sharp spike in the number of passengers transiting Kolkata airport in the last three festive months of 2024 broke several footfall records. However, it resulted in an eight-step slide in the airport's ranking in the customer service survey. Passengers complained of more time spent at immigration counters and security screening, difficulty in navigating the airport, and challenges in boarding connecting flights.
In the third quarter, the airport clocked its best-ever ranking of 64, but in the fourth quarter of 2024, it fell to 72, behind smaller airports like Trichy, Indore, Goa, Pune, Bhu-baneshwar, and Varanasi. In total, 15 AAI airports participated in the survey. Chennai airport, which also catered to a large number of flyers in this period, slid from 60 to 73.
TOI reported that Kolkata airport registered its highest post-pandemic passenger traffic for the festive month of Dec 2024, with a footfall of 20.2 lakh passengers. This was significantly more than Dec 2023's 18.5 lakh footfall and marginally short of the 2019 figure of the highest-ever count of 21 lakh passengers. The airport also registered its highest post-pandemic passenger traffic in Oct, driven by festivals, including Durga Puja, Kalipuja, Diwali, and Bhai Phonta.
"We realise passengers underwent some discomfort due to so many travelling together. We deployed extra personnel and tried to offer the best service. We are working on the negative feedback and will ensure we provide better service to passengers despite heavy traffic this year and improve our ranking," said a senior official of Kolkata airport.
The survey on airport service quality (ASQ) conducted by Airports Council International (ACI), the trade association of airports, highlighted long waits at immigration counters, difficulty in accessing the airport, walking distance inside the terminal, ease of taking connecting flights, availability of charging stations, and ease of going through security screening as major peeve points for flyers at Kolkata airport during the festive season and winter. There was positive feedback, however, on several aspects that have been perennial problems at Kolkata airport, like wi-fi quality, availability and cleanliness of washrooms, car parking facilities, helpfulness of staff in the check-in area and security screening, value for money at available shops, and the overall ambience.
ACI's ASQ programme is the only globally recognised procedure that measures how satisfied passengers are while travelling through an airport. The survey instrument has 31 ASQ attribute items classified in terms of their respective functional areas. Flyers rate the survey on a 5-point scale.
According to the AAI report released this week, there was negative feedback since the last quarter on 12 areas. "The Oct-Dec period is the busiest for us. The airport received an overall score of 4.89 out of 5. In the previous quarter, it was 4.92," the official said.
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