The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Coimbatore News : Customer satisfaction index for airport

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 14, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore

Customer satisfaction index for airport

By Our Staff Reporter

COIMBATORE, OCT 13. The Coimbatore Airport has bagged the first position in the customer satisfaction index study conducted by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) in association with the Ministry of Civil Aviation.

Talking to The Hindu the Airport Director, C.Vijaykumar, said that the airport despite being the smallest one in the country had stood first among all the 30 airports in the country. The AAI and Civil Aviation Ministry used to conduct the study twice in a year with a view to study the customer service facilities at the airports.

The study was aimed at encouraging the airports to do well to strive for bagging the first few positions and to make the airports strive for betterment. It also gave the opportunity for the airports to identify the areas where they lacked initiatives and improve the criteria for judging the best airports.

Customer feedback

The airports are selected on the basis of a feedback given by travellers who are given a questionnaire both while emplaning and disembarking. On its part, the Coimbatore Airport would enhance the customer satisfaction levels to retain the position, he said.

To provide the passengers a better ambience and enhanced facilities, the AAI had brought in more shops including a herbal store, besides a touch screen kiosk for accessing flight information eliminating human element. Cell phone chargers have also been provided enabling the air travellers to stay in touch with their near and dear ones. Such a facility would help businessmen who are always on the move to keep their mobile phones alive.

The frontage of the airport had been beautified with creeper plants, benches and the loose earth had been set right by placing inter-locking stones. While waiting for the aircraft, the travellers at the lounge could get entertainment on a 60 inches big TV screen, he said.

Runway expansion

The much-awaited runway expansion work would gain momentum shortly with the AAI getting into work on the field. It was originally scheduled to expand the runway from the existing 7,500 ft to 10,000 ft and in the first phase would be expanded to 8,500 ft. The expansion would enable landing and take off of wide-bodied and fat-bellied aircrafts. Even as the work in the first phase of runway expansion gets underway, land acquisition work for the second phase would begin, he said.

Such an expansion would provide more landing space and parking bays to increase the traffic in terms of cargo as well as passengers, Mr.Vijaykumar said. After the first phase expansion, the Coimbatore Airport could handle aircrafts weighing even up to 2,100 tonnes. For handling aircrafts of Boeing 747 the second phase would have to be completed, he said.

The AAI embarked on this ambitious project to rope in more domestic and international airliners to operate their services in a bid to tap the tourism and industrial potential. Initially, the project outlay was fixed at Rs 3.5 crores for land acquisition and owing to inevitable situations; the project cost had escalated to Rs 26 crores. The cost escalation had, in fact, thrown some spokes in the expansion work. Originally it was scheduled to acquire 114 acres and because of the rise in land cost, the AAI would initially go in for acquiring only 85 acres, he said. The reduction in extent of land proposed for acquisition had helped the AAI in bringing down the required investment by nearly 25 per cent.

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