Hamad International Airport (HIA), the home to national carrier Qatar Airways, recently received the prestigious ‘5-Star Airport’ designation by Skytrax, a UK-based consultancy that reviews and ranks airlines and airports worldwide.
The 5-Star Airport rating is awarded to airports achieving the highest, overall quality performance and recognises those airports providing excellent facilities for customers combined with high quality airport staff service.
Airport quality ranking covers front-line areas for departures, arrival and transfer, including airport facilities, customer service, security, immigration, shop outlets and food and beverage facilities.
The highest rating – five stars – has previously only been awarded to five other airports worldwide: Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong, Tokyo-Haneda and Munich.
Qatar can certainly be proud of the fact that it could design and create an ultra-modern airport that serves more than 50mn passengers every year, and will grow to 65mn after the proposed major expansion to enhance the Hamad International Airport’s annual capacity by 2021.
The airport, Qatar’s gateway to the world, has been designed with customer experience to the fore. The result is a world-class facility, where the concept of hospitality underpins everything. Customers stepping inside Hamad International Airport, undoubtedly, experience luxury and space, sophistication and elegance.
This recognition is particularly timely as it comes after a year of reaching a number of strategic milestones at HIA, including the introduction of its iBeacon enabled mobile app, the launch of the ‘Smart Airport’ features in the terminal, the operation of the dual passenger train shuttle to concourses D and E and the opening of multiple duty free stores.
Moreover, HIA has continued to work closely with Qatar Museums adding multiple international and local art installations across the terminal.
HIA is one of the most efficient airport hub operations in the world, with a 90.5% on-time departure performance for the fiscal year 2016.
With HIA already becoming a huge success by providing easy connectivity to millions of passengers globally, the Government of Qatar approved a multi-billion dollar expansion of the airport that will increase the airport’s capacity by more than 30%.
The aim is to complete the expansion as soon as possible. It is being designed by British architects Foster and Partners.
Although development is on HIA’s top priority, it does not dilute Qatar’s commitment to the environment. Already HIA has a target to improve carbon efficiency by 30% (by 2030) along with a series of initiatives to help save energy and optimise the consumption of vehicle fuel.
Air travel not only connects people but also nations, thereby enhancing global economy. Air transport contributes to sustainable development and by facilitating tourism and trade, it generates economic growth, provides jobs and scale up revenues.
Truly, HIA has transformed the travelling experience for millions of passengers by offering world-class travel efficiency and the highest possible standards of passenger care while setting new benchmarks for airports globally.
