State-owned Airports Company South Africa (Acsa) announced on Wednesday that its – and the country’s – three largest airports had scored in the top ten of their respective categories in global punctuality league tables for 2019. These league tables are published by global travel data company OAG, using full-year data for last year, and which cover several hundred airports and airlines all over the world.
The airports are Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport (in the large airport category), Cape Town International Airport (in the medium airport category) and Durban’s King Shaka International Airport (in the small airport category). OR Tambo ranked tenth in its category, King Shaka ninth in its segment and Cape Town second in its category. OR Tambo’s on-time performance was 83.01%, King Shaka’s was 83.59% and Cape Town’s was 92.5%.
“The importance of punctuality and efficiency extends well beyond being items on a business performance scorecard,” affirmed Acsa acting group executive: airports management Deon Cloete. “They are the core components of passenger satisfaction and a critical focus for our airports. Ultimately, on-time performance creates predictability which is an essential value-add for passengers.”
He highlighted that an airport was a community of businesses and entities, operating in the same place and in collaboration with each other. An airport community involved the airport owner, airlines, ground handling companies, a wide range of airline supply contractors, and security companies. “Typically, only around 10% of people working at an airport are directly employed by the owner of the airport, in this case Airports Company South Africa.”
“Keeping an airport operating efficiently is therefore very complex, requires extremely tight collaboration and an ability to respond to events as they happen,” he pointed out. “We are pleased that as airport communities we have been able to maintain good levels of on-time performance and we appreciate the daily efforts of every person working at our airports.”
OAG defines small airports as those with annual figures of between 2.5-million and 5-million departing passengers, medium airports as those with 5-million to 10-million departing passengers and large airports as those with between 10-million and 20-million departing passengers. The OAG tables were calculated from 57.7-million flight records.