Saturday 19 October 2013

Airport Review : Kualanamu International Airport

Review by : Gan Yung Chyan
                 / KUCINTA SETIA
Distributed to All Press & Travel Professionals

                                           

Kualanamu International Airport is of one hour's taxi ride and a 45 minutes' ride on an Airport Railink service to Medan city centre. It is located outside Medan city proper, in the town of Kualanamu. It has the same status as the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang.

Kualanamu is the important town with rich soil sources and expensive land. Medanese (the people of Medan) say that Singapore gets reclaimed land and constructs flats thanks to soil imports from Kualanamu. The coastline of Kualanamu as a result is dirty and not conducive to be exploited as a beach haven like Phuket.

In general, Singapore imports oil and natural gas from Pekanbaru, water from Johor and Batam and soil from Kualanamu.

The Airport Railink Services started operations in August 2013. There are only directions and Timetable signs in Bahasa Indonesia.

There are no Medan tourism board counters. Hence, travellers must have perfect knowledge about destinations in Medan and Kualanamu before buying any ticket to Kualanamu.

There are absolutely no airport offices of airlines and therefore no station managers of airlines to handle baggage matters and disputes with airlines on ticketing, inflight sales and inflight services. There is only an air ticket lounge for ticket purchases but no refunds. Disputes over ticketing and baggage matters can only be settled by head offices of airlines in Jakarta, Singapore and other countries.

Unlike the closed Polonia International Airport of Medan, international airlines such as SilkAir, Tigerair Mandala, AirAsia, Valuair, Malaysia Airlines and Mihin Lanka have no airport offices at Kualanamu.

Before departure, check-in counters of airlines issue 2D boarding passes that have to be scanned before travellers proceed to the less than 11 departure gates. Boarding passes issued during web-check-in on Internet and airline check-in kiosks outside Kualanamu and Medan are useless at Kualanamu for check-in verification.

The only one main Terminal building of Kualanamu is three storeys tall and the size is as big as the two-storied Soekarno-Hatta International Airport Terminal 3. It handles domestic and international flights at the same time. It is the tallest airport building of Indonesia.

The journalist of Sayacinta - Airport began the debut return one-day shuttle to Kualanamu on direct flights via Singapore with  Tigerair Mandala and AirAsia Indonesia on 5 October 2013 for this review.


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