The Chennai airport, also known as the Anna International airport has been rated the second best for its quality of service.  

The airport service quality survey, which is conducted by the Airports Council International every three months, has shown Chennai airport’s customer satisfaction index improve for the April-June quarter, scoring 4.30 points on a scale of five as compared to 4.10 in the January-March quarter. It has been ranked second after the Kolkata airport in terms of quality of service among eleven public sector airports in the country. The global ranking too has improved from 114 to 56.

However, I am not so happy about the survey results. Flying out of the Chennai airport early in the morning is a pain due to long queues and slow security check. Often, passengers of four to five different flights are made to stand in the same queue, at the risk of everybody missing their flight.

The number of security counters is also not adequate and above all the approach of the staff is casual. Last month, I was travelling to Hyderabad — I had to board an early morning flight and I was stuck in a long queue. When I reached the security scanner, I found that the trays were missing and passengers were dumping their stuff on the other side of the scanning machine. I kept on asking the security staff to pass on the tray so I could keep my bag, laptop and phone for scanning, but it fell on deaf ears. At that, the lady standing behind me in the queue made a quick comparison of the Chennai airport to the Bangalore airport, saying the latter was faster.

This was not the first time that I encountered such an unprofessional conduct. In January this year, I was travelling to Allahabad (my hometown). This time too I had to board an early morning flight. Although I had reached the airport well in time, the same problem of the long queue made me reach the boarding point late.

In many reports, I have also read people complaining about the quality of food at the airport. But, I have never got a chance to have food owing to long queues.

The airport certainly calls for improvement in service. It is one of the largest international gateways, the third busiest airport in India in terms of passenger traffic. It is maintained by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and is on the way to be privatized along with five more airports. The airport was recently upgraded to international standards at a cost of Rs 2,015 crore and inaugurated in 2013.