No African international airport made it on the list of winners in world-renowned Airport Service Quality Awards (ASQAs) for delivering best customer experience, released by Airports Council International (ACI) in Thursday.
It would be recalled that Kempegowda International Airport, Bangalore, India, was the first airport to win both a Departures and an Arrivals award from ASQAs based on the new Arrivals Survey.
Perennial winners from around the world include Indianapolis International Airport, Beijing Capital International Airport, Singapore Changi Airport, and Toronto Pearson, Aeroporto di Roma-Fiumicino, Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, Delhi’s, Indira Gandhi International Airport, Shanghai Pudong International Airport, and Sheremetyevo International Airport.
However, this year, a number of airports have won their first ASQ Award, including Aeropuerto Internacional Ramón Villeda Morales in Honduras, as well as Dublin, Oslo, Helsinki, Southampton, Bristol, and London City airports. Spain’s Aeropuerto de Almería, Aeropuerto de Girona, Aeropuerto de Melilla, Aeropuerto de Zaragoza, and Aeropuerto de Alicante-Elche are also first time winners. Fort McMurray Airport in Canada and Muscat Airport in Oman are also newcomers to the ASQ Awards fraternity, while several top-performing previous winners have again featured prominently.
ACI World Director General, Angela Gittens in her remarks, averred that “In the new Best Infrastructure and Facilitation” category, no fewer than seven Indonesian and eight Chinese airports are recognized in their size category.
“The Airport Service Quality Awards celebrate the achievements of airports in delivering the best customer experience and they represent the highest possible accolade for airport operators around the world,” said. “In both the traditional and new categories, these airports have responded to the evolving needs of passengers to deliver higher levels of service and an award-winning performance.
“Airports have recognized that delivering a better customer experience is an important business tool in an increasingly competitive industry. ACI’s ASQ is the only globally-established programme that provides objective measurement and benchmarking for airports to help drive their performance,” Gittens noted.
The winning airports will meet at the ASQ Awards Ceremony, to be held during the second ACI Customer Experience Global Summit, taking place in Bali, Indonesia in September.
The ASQ Departures programme measures passengers’ satisfaction across 34 key performance indicators. Three quarters of the world’s 100 busiest airports are part of the programme which means that, in 2018, more than half of the world’s 8.3 billion travellers passed through an ASQ airport.
