AOT upbeat Suvarnabhumi to be among 50 best airports next year

AOT director Kirati Kijmanawat said passenger services at Suvarnabhumi

Airport have been improving a lot in past 10 years since he took office.

The improvements helped Suvarnabhumi move up from its 68th rank in 2023 to 58th this year in the World’s Best Airports ranking by Skytrax, Kirati said.

Kirati attributed the ranking improvement to the opening of the Midfield Satellite 1 building in September 2023. The terminal boosted Suvarnabhumi’s passenger-handling capacity from 45 million to 60 million per year.

“During the past year after my appointment, I’ve been improving passenger services to offer the best ones and to shorten passengers’ waiting times,” Kirati said.

“The long waiting times for the immigration process and for luggage checking has been solved.”

Kirati said the priority task of AOT is to develop Suvarnabhumi further so as to push it into the top-50 ranking by next year.

To achieve that goal, AOT is now cooperating with the Immigration Bureau to shorten immigration process’ time.

He said 200 more immigration officers would be deployed to the airport and in August, there will be 80 “Auto Gate” kiosks that scan the faces of arriving passengers and allow them to pass through without having to wait in queues at immigration counters.

Kirati added that the automatic immigration check-in system would later be expanded to cover passengers from up to 91 countries.

The director said AOT would also buy CT (computed tomography) scanners to be mounted at the luggage-checking areas for departing passengers.

With the CT scanners, passengers would be allowed to carry bottles of liquids or drinks on board, he added.

He said the CT scanners might be purchased within a year to gradually replace the old ones with lower capability.

Kirati said that during the past one year, AOT had cut average service time at the airport from 40-50 minutes to 37 minutes – which was 15 minutes for luggage retrieval and 22 minutes for the immigration process. But AOT aimed to shorten the immigration process time to 15 minutes, he said.

Kirati said a major issue at Suvarnabhumi Airport was that some passengers arrived sooner than their airlines started the check-in process, causing them to crowd the departure lounge.

He said AOT has asked various airlines to start check-in four hours before departure to clear the waiting passengers as soon as possible.

AOT would also persuade airlines to use self-check-in kiosks that would allow passengers to check in six hours before their flights.

“If all these automatic machines uses, AOT is confident that Suvarnabhumi will rise into the 50-best-airports ranking,” Kirati said.

He added that AOT also aimed to push Suvarnabhumi into the top 20 best airports within five years by speeding up the expansion of the eastern passenger building, adding 60,000 square metres of space to the airport.