ACI ASIA-PACIFIC NEWS

Vivian Fung rounds up the latest news from across the region and highlights a few global initiatives.

Airports Council International (ACI) and HNA Airport Group Co Ltd signed a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at the recent 27th ACI Africa/World Annual General Assembly, Conference & Exhibition in Mauritius that will see enhanced co-operation between both organisations on various programmes and initiatives.

These include airport safety reviews, customer experience solutions and training to promote and facilitate excellence in operations and management at HNA’s airports.

The HNA Airport Group, which currently operates 15 Chinese airports and has a controlling stake in Frankfurt-Hahn Airport in Germany, expects to gain value above and beyond their existing participation in ACI programmes including: the peer-review ACI Airport Excellence (APEX) programme, and the facilitation of the implementation of its recommendations; the ACI Airport Service Quality (ASQ) programme, including the new ASQ Arrivals Survey and Employee Suevey; and, support and expertise from ACI Global Training on relevant training needs.

“ACI is delighted to confirm enhanced collaboration with the HNA Airport Group Co Ltd to support APEX and ASQ programmes and training at their airports,” said ACI World director general, Angela Gittens.

“This MoU is in line with ACI’s mission to promote and facilitate excellence in airport operations and management.”

While Liao Hongyu, chairman of Hainan HNA Airport Management Co Ltd, said: “We are honoured to become the first Chinese airport operator to sign this important MoU, which will serve to enhance our operations, and access ongoing training and insights from the various programmes that ACI offers. We always seek to provide the best and most up-to-date insight to our airports and we believe that ACI’s programmes provide this.” 

First ever in-house training course in Iran

Within the context of ACI’s objective of supporting member airports in developing nations, ACI Asia-Pacific successfully organised two in-house training courses in Iran in October, which  focused on capacity building.

Directors and general managers from 50 airports of the Iran Airport Company (IAC) attended the two courses, held in the city of Mashhad, which were on the ‘Key principles of Air Service Development’ and ‘Airport business models’.

With IAC in the process of developing its airports, the company is keen to learn more about the key concepts of how modern airports operate as well as how to attract new business partners and airlines.

IAC board member and deputy CEO for airport operations, Hossein Bagherian, stated: “We would like to thank ACI for the excellent courses for which we received very positive feedback from our airport managers. We are looking forward to arranging more courses in Iran.”