Airport: Our present and our future

Once again, Mauritius’Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport has failed to be named as Africa’s best airport in its class, being beaten by rivals in South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire. We made the top 100 on the Skytrax’s The World’s Airports Award, but we only just scraped onto that ranking.

It’s been a couple of years since the airport last won the award, and while rival destinations have been upping their game, our airport has been sliding backwards. With the airport being a tourist’s first impression of Mauritius, is this really what we want from our airport? Is this really the image we want to project to the rest of the world as country and as a nation? Why, after huge financial injections and despite the efforts of every man and every woman working there, we are unable to maintain an honorable level?

Our airport is failing to keep up with advances in technology. The airport suffers from long queues at security and boarding, frustrating shopping and poor restaurants for passengers to eat at, slow baggage delivery in arrivals. All those things can be vastly improved just by applying new technologies and techniques and changing the processes followed by staff. Overwhelming advertising and fading colors around the airport are also contributing to the negative impression.

The future, though, is not completely bleak. Aviation is set to continue growing across the world, and Mauritius is in a prime position to take advantage of a potential boom in worldwide travel. The tourism industry in Mauritius is vital to the success of the national economy, generating around Rs 61billion annually. But in order to ensure this level of revenue in the years ahead, the airport’s role will become even more important.

The number of passengers using Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport every year is on the up and the airport is also receiving more cargo than ever before. We constructed a new, sophisticated passenger terminal in 2013 in order to keep up with the rising demand. It is something that the country can be proud of, but soon, our airport will need upgrading once again.

“Airport is a mirror of our nation. It’s our history, our failures and successes, our dreams and our hopes…”

The new Master Plan for the further development of the airport has reportedly been prepared with the last Budget reserving several billion rupees for the construction of a new passenger terminal. Do we have an urgency in the next 5-10 years to be hugely indebted again, when the existing facility can still be made more efficient and attractive?

Maybe not. The internal setting and processes of the existing airport may be reviewed, optimized and modernized. Biometric technology is slowly integrating into airports around the world. Soon, many airport operations at our airport, such as boarding and baggage handling, will need to be replaced. Traditional queuing and screening may no longer be necessary as passengers could be scanned automatically and without stress by passing through the sensors.

It is not a secret for anyone that the aircrafts, towing vehicles, passenger’s bridges and buses will be gradually changed to electric vehicles. The inevitable use of electric equipment will significantly affect the electrical load on the airport and we need to be ready for that. Mauritius has a significant natural resource in the amount of sunlight that beams onto the island, and that can certainly be used to the airport’s advantage going forward. The first airport in the world powered entirely by solar energy, India’s Cochin International Airport, has been successfully operating since 2015. It is an example we can follow.

In our era of unclear geopolitical change, the sense of place and destination also becomes fundamentally important. The individuality of the airport: inside-to-outside design, attributes of our culture and hospitality, unique passenger experience and personalized journeys, customized welcoming for international conferences, business meetings and marriages, made-in-Moris commercial offerings and promotion for our crafts and nature – all that can make our airport more attractive for travelers.

Another aspect is unexploited air passenger and cargo transfer which could bring substantial earnings and increase the popularity of the island. There are thousands of aircrafts crossing over our heads in Indian Ocean’s air space. They land in Dubai or South Africa, but not in Mauritius, prior to proceed to their final destination because we don’t have the adequate facilities for that. Icelandair has had tremendous success in attracting passengers flying between Europe and the United States to connect through Reykjavík instead of flying direct. It has seen passenger numbers flying through the country grow massively and it’s even encouraged many tourists to take an extended stopover in the country, boosting tourist numbers. In 2009, Iceland’s airport had 1.8m passengers. In 2018, they had 9.8m. Could Mauritius potentially do similar with passengers flying between Southern Africa to Europe, Australia and Asia? It’s certainly possible.

Our “Air Corridors” didn’t last long. We have had good and bad experiences with low-cost carriers in the past. Good because it increased our revenue, bad because it was for relatively short time. The recent success of Norwegian Airlines, flying between Europe and the rest of the world, shows there is certainly a market for that. The low-cost air transportation is a very specific field, but, again, we are absolutely not prepared for that.

According to the experts, the future of air transportation in the next 20-50 years will drastically change. Biometrics will finally replace all airport operations. Bags will no longer travel with passengers. Aviation will come down from the high skies to your homes: we may face micro-airport-stations that caters for individual electric aerial vehicles moving the passengers, medical, police and emergencies all over the country (this concept has already been studied by the Canadian government to revitalize Montreal).

In a new era of increased air connectivity and rising passenger expecting to reach, according to num- bers Airport Council International, more than 20 billion in 2040, our airport will definitely need to be further expanded. But for now, there are many other improvements that can be done to improve our airport in the short-term in order to be ready for that expansion. So, let’s re-work what we have and prepare for the future.