“Obviously, we have an issue at the borders [the waiting lines] and we are working intensively with ANA to redesign the departure area to make it easier. But – I was a very frequent passenger – no one can be happy with the passenger experience nowadays at national airports,” said Hugo Espírito Santo, in Macau.
The governor was speaking at the 50th National Congress of the Portuguese Association of Travel and Tourism Agencies (APAVT), after the audience heard the president of the Board of Directors of ANA – Aeroportos de Portugal remind them that Lisbon airport handles 36 million passengers and was designed for 22 million.
“We are in a process of constant improvement of the facilities. (…) It’s a permanently open-hearted operation,” said José Luís Arnaut, citing constraints of various kinds.
Both had already mentioned the waiting lines for border control as a serious problem in Lisbon.
The Secretary of State says that this doesn’t justify everything.
“I think that, in addition to everything we are doing [in terms of improvements], we have airports that are cramped, with narrow corridors, with the wrong indicators from the point of view of service quality, even from the point of view of baggage delivery,” warned the governor.
“Issues”
“We have repeatedly had some issues with waiting times at the X-ray machines, with passengers with reduced mobility (…). And nowadays, we have enormous problems with waiting times. We also have to look and remember that this is not just a problem with passports and borders. It is also a need to look at and reassess what constitutes quality of service at airports. And this is something we have also been insisting on: we [the executive branch] and ANAC [the regulator] with ANA, in order to really make a qualitative leap here,” he explained.
Hugo Espírito Santo pointed out the need to always have safety present in this sector.
“I look at the safety data that NAV [air traffic control] and ANAC give me. In short, this leaves me somewhat concerned. These are machines that are very close to their limit and, therefore, I have some concerns,” he admitted.
Earlier, the official had assured that the executive branch is closely monitoring the queues at Lisbon airport, admitting that they are an embarrassment for the government, which hopes to have resolved them by the summer.
“The border situation is an embarrassment for the government. There’s no other way to describe it. We have to be humble about what we do, and at this moment, it’s an embarrassment, and the only thing that could be done is to apologize,” he said.
