What passengers expect from airports beyond just air safety measures

In India, the Airports Economic Regulatory Authority (AERA) decides on the tariffs an airport could charge from the passengers

What do passengers wish the airports they travel through to do? While the horrible Air India plane crash has justifiably focused attention on safety in the air, it is by any reckoning a huge rarity. Whereas issues at airports are much more mundane and happen often enough with passengers for them to take notice.

 

There is more. As a number of airports across West Asia closed down on Monday, the risks of being present in these high-visibility spaces when nations are clobbering each other was made apparent to all the passengers who had a ticket to pass through those. In the modern era, we spend a lot of time at the airports.

 

There are global bodies which track the performance of airports. Skytrax is one of the most popular, which ranks airports based on customer feedback. Airports are naturally keen to figure in the list favourably. There is also Airports Council International, an industry body of airport operators which hands out the annual ASQ Awards that recognise airport excellence in customer experience. The difference in ranking methods is based on surveys of departures and arrivals.

 

But could the ratings be made by the regulators? Unlikely so, as this is a tricky area. In India, the Airports Economic Regulatory Authority (AERA), for instance, decides on the tariffs an airport could charge from the passengers. Ratings of airports could open problems worse than a luggage bin at the airports going off to some other destination.

 

There are various factors the AERA takes into account when setting user charges, the price passengers must pay to use an airport. Those charges are stitched on to the flight ticket price. The decision, as the recent one on Delhi airport noted, was that the airport operator (GMR) had proposed a 730 per cent increase in the charges. “However, after conducting a thorough analysis and applying prudence checks to each regulatory building block, (the regulator) has determined a significantly lower increase of 140 per cent.” 

 

The charges were levied only on those catching international flights. As the order goes on to explain, the rising charges would pay for capital expenditure, besides maintaining operational efficiency and ensuring proper service quality. The charges do not meet just service standards. Of course, one can argue that the rise in capital expenditure also goes to meet, finally, the same service obligations. Repair to a conveyor belt or that of a runway are difficult for passengers to discern as measures to help make their experience smoother, but the connection is obvious.

 

But this may not impress passengers, especially the first-timers taking off or landing at the myriad airports which are now dotting the country’s smaller cities. The conditions of passenger facilities in other modes like the railway stations and at inter-state bus terminals are often pathetic. So the passengers are accustomed to sloppy services by the nationalised operators of these facilities and could conceivably be pardoned for thinking that the airports could do the same and demand just lower-priced tickets.

 

This correspondent has faced more than once the experience of the Digi Yatra app not functioning at more than one airport. The app is supposed to compress the time it takes to navigate the various gates of an airport.

 

It is here that the regulators, like in other sectors, could play the role of educators. A simple grading of the airports is likely to throw up an obvious set of winners. Those numbers will not help the public nor make the setting of the airport charges less contentious. A research report in the Journal of Transport, Economics and Policy by Darryl Biggar argues that explanations for the airport take-off and landing charges, a part of the user charges set by the regulator, do not control for the potential to exercise market power. Instead, “the primary rationale for regulation of airports is not the minimisation of deadweight loss, but the protection and promotion of sunk complementary investments by airport users”. In other words, the more the money spent on an airport, the more the tendency to extract user charge.

 

It is understood that the central government is working to make the ratings of the airport, derived from industry assessment, public. It could work if the methods through which these ratings were arrived at were also given equal play. For instance, identifying what are the pain points of the travellers, like those at the check-in counters. How much time does a security check eat up at an airport, and what is the time by which the checked-in bags come to the belts for the passengers to take on? Else, making public some of the ratings is unlikely to change perceptions about how an airport functions.