MAHB expects better passenger traffic in 2H

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File photo shows international passengers going through KLIA’s immigration points. International traffic for KLIA also grew by four per cent supported by improved passenger traffic from Northeast Asia and West Asia. — Bernama photo

File photo shows international passengers going through KLIA’s immigration points. International traffic for KLIA also grew by four per cent supported by improved passenger traffic from Northeast Asia and West Asia. — Bernama photo

SEPANG: Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd (MAHB) expects passenger traffic at Malaysian airports to improve further in the second half of this year following a pick up in momentum early this year.

Managing director Datuk Badlisham Ghazali said 2015 was a challenging year for Malaysian airports as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) had shown a flat growth, predominantly due to residual effect of two tragedies involving the national carrier (MH370 and MH17) and also Malaysia Airlines’ restructuring.

“Hopefully, this had already hit the base and started going up as what we are seeing now,” he told reporters at KLIA’s 18th Anniversary Celebration here yesterday.

As of May this year, Malaysian airports had recorded an encouraging growth of 4.3 per cent year-on-year, with KLIA Main recording 9.3 million passengers and klia2 11.6 million passenegers, which was a 13.4 per cent increase over the same corresponding period, said Badlisham.

“In KLIA, the number of internatioanal and domestic (passengers) has gone up, due to new airlines coming in like Shaheen Airline and VietJet Air which introduce new routes, and existing airlines increasing their frequencies as was announced by KLM recently as well as high growth from Malindo Air,” he said.

Badlisham said international traffic for KLIA also grew by four per cent supported by improved passenger traffic from Northeast Asia and West Asia.

On the higher passenger traffic at klia2 compared to KLIA Main, he said it was not an issue as this validated the planning for klia2 which was built to cater for 45 million people capacity while KLIA Main’s capacity was 30 million.

As for the klia2 branding issue with AirAsia, he reiterated that there was no issue with working together with the airline to market and make the terminal bigger and accessible for passengers.

“The AirAsia brand is low cost and that is great.

People know AirAsia as low cost and we have been helping to market the carrier as low cost including making sure there’s enough facilities for the transfer,” he said.

The only issue was on the naming convention of the airport as the airport branding (KLIA and klia2) is synonymous with Malaysia and that needed to be protected while avoiding confusion among passengers by using different names.

“People do not change the name of the child to suit what the child intends to become.

“Please do not change the name of the child which is the name of the airport,” he said. — Bernama