Tan Son Nhat opens new taxi zone in major improvement bid
Tan Son Nhat opens new taxi zone in major improvement bid
Passengers can now flag down a cab in a new taxi zone inaugurated Thursday at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City, among several other changes introduced at the country’s busiest terminal.
The new taxi zone is located in front of the domestic hall, serving passengers of both arrival and departure flights, an airport representative said on Thursday.
The new facility helps double the taxi-hailing capacity of the airport to embrace Vietnam’s upcoming Lunar New Year, or Tet in Vietnamese, when demand for air travel peaks, according to the source.
The management of Tan Son Nhat is making multiple changes to improve service quality to be well prepared for Tet, it said in a plan announced in mid-December.
The holiday this year falls on February 8, but demand for air travel normally soars a week before and after the holiday, during which Tan Son Nhat executives have promised to serve passengers with much improved service.
Along with the new taxi zone, the Ho Chi Minh City airport has put an additional free Wi-Fi system into use, with 164 hotspots, ensuring stable and strong connection for passengers.
The security check at Hall B, where low-cost carrier Vietjet places its check-in counters, has also been rearranged to become more spacious, according to the airport representative.
The queuing zone of the security area has been expanded to 250 square meters from 150 square meters, creating more space for passengers to complete their procedures.
A simplified baggage scanning process, which combines the procedures carried out by customs officers and airport security guards into one, has also helped travelers save more time when leaving or entering Vietnam since it was implemented in mid-November.
“All of the changes in taxi zones, check-in and security procedures, and Wi-Fi systems have been made simultaneously to improve service quality, save time for flyers, and reduce overloading in the coming Tet,” airport director Dang Tuan Tu told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Thursday.
The airport is also developing a five-story parking house in front of the domestic terminal to be able to accommodate more vehicles.
The new facility, spanning 68,000 square meters compared to the 14,350 square meter existing one, is slated for completion in March 2016.
The new parking space, including a taxi zone, will be connected to the arrival hall of the domestic terminal through an underground pathway, so that passengers will not have to cross the street overground to get to their vehicles or hail a cab, according to the airport.
The changes at Tan Son Nhat, which has already exceeded its design capacity of 25 million passengers a year, have been introduced to follow an order by the Ministry of Transport, in the wake of a quality assessment report that pinpointed myriad shortcomings at the airport earlier this month.
