The Rajiv Gandhi International Airport (RGIA) in Hyderabad was ranked among one of the top 10 airports in the world after a survey conducted by AirHelp, a company which deals with the rights of air passengers.
According to the survey, Hamad International Airport in Doha in Qatar was rated the world’s best airport with 8.39 out of 10, followed by Tokyo International Airport in Japan and Athens International Airport in Greece.
The Hyderabad airport was ranked eighth, with a score of 8.27 out of 10, just below Singapore’s Changi Airport and above the Tenerife North Airport in Spain.
Other airports that made it to the top ten included the Afonso Pena International Airport in Brazil and the Moscow Sheremetyevo International Airport in Russia besides the Gdansk Lech Walesa Airport in Poland.
Kuwait International Airport and Lisbon Portela Airport in Portugal were given the least scores in the survey.
Air Help said that it calculated the scores taking a number of factors into consideration. This included ‘On-Time Performance’, which calculated how likely the flight would be on time, ‘Service Quality’, which rated customer service, queues and cleanliness at the airports and ‘Food and Shops’, which included rating an airports' eating and shopping options.
Earlier this year, the GMR-led Hyderabad International Airport commissioned the Interim Domestic Arrivals Terminal (IDAT) as part of ongoing expansion works. The facility was designed to handle almost 50 percent of the domestic arrival traffic, amounting to around 30,000 passengers daily.
In March 2017, the RGIA secured the first position in the Airport Service Quality (ASQ) passengers' survey in the 5-15 million passengers per annum (MPPA) category for the year 2016.
The ASQ survey statistics showed that Hyderabad airport had steadily improved its score from 4.4 in 2009 to 4.9 in 2016 (measured on scale of 1 to 5). Hyderabad airport also had the honour to be the first airport in India to have been awarded by Airports Council International (ACI), headquartered at Canada's Montreal.
The airport handled 6.2 million passengers in its first financial year.
RGIA also received an honour for becoming the first airport in Asia Pacific in its category to become carbon neutral in 2017.