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EDITORIAL: Airports need a re-vamp

Before the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) re-took power, it confidently said: “We’re ready!” But the achievements of the party’s first month in office show this was far from true. The government also said it was ready to deliver President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) first major election promise: allowing Chinese tourists to come to Taiwan. However, even KMT Central Standing Committee member Sean Lien (連勝文) said the nation’s airports are old and neglected, and that he worried Chinese tourists arriving at Taipei’s Songshan Airport would feel like they had landed in Pyongyang instead.

Harsh words, but Songshan is in a bad state. As Minister of Transportation and Communication Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) said, this is the result of years of neglect. The Democratic Progressive Party administration not only opposed making Songshan the hub for direct cross-strait flights, it wanted to move the airport and turn the site into a park. So it wasn’t interested in investing in the airport.

While neighboring countries like Singapore have expanded their airports or built new ones like Hong Kong International Airport or Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, it is disheartening to see buildings at Taoyuan International Airport and Taipei Songshan Airport with ceiling stains from water leaks, broken windows, outdated customs clearance facilities and other problems. Even Chinese airlines representatives visiting Taiwan think there is room for improvement. With Taoyuan and Songshan airports in such a state of disrepair, imagine what other airports in the country look like.

People in the tourism industry can’t wait to get started in the cross-strait business: they are busy printing explanations in simplified Chinese, retraining their staff, studying the differences between Chinese and Taiwanese Mandarin and memorizing the exchange rate between the Chinese Yuan and the New Taiwan dollar. They are sparing no effort to make sure they are ready to welcome Chinese tourists.

But when a tourist’s first impression is a dilapidated airport, Taiwan’s reputation as a “beautiful island” could easily be destroyed. The government needs to increase efforts to renovate the airports, so that facilities are up-to-date and their standards of efficiency, safety, comfort and convenience are up to scratch.

It is also important to implement security and health checks for the expected influx. Undoubtedly, Chinese tourists will be a mixed bag. Most will be ordinary tourists, but a handful of smugglers, illegal immigrants and spies will also enter the country. If customs and immigration authorities are incapable of preventing this from happening by rapidly and efficiently monitoring suspicious individuals, it will take twice the effort to deal with the problem after unsavory individuals have entered the country.

There is also a great discrepancy in the quality of medical services on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Once a large number of Chinese tourists enter Taiwan, the protective screen for epidemics will disappear. The question is whether the Ministry of Health can work out an effective quarantine mechanism to prevent public heath disasters such as SARS from happening again.

Airport infrastructure is linked to national image. Although the airports cannot be repaired overnight, the government needs to show a determination to improve the nation’s tourism infrastructure.
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