Tourism bottleneck: relief on the way as work is due to start on new airport later this year
The city has outlived the usefulness of Phoenix International Airport, a facility originally designed to handle 1.5 million passengers a year – but saw 16 million visitors pass through its gates last year
As an ever-increasing number of tourists pour into Sanya each year, the need for a new airport that can handle growing passenger volumes has become evident.
Sanya’s Phoenix International Airport, which was built more than 20 years ago, was originally designed to cope with a maximum 1.5 million passengers a year. As the city’s tourism industry grew at an extremely fast pace through the latter half of the 2000s, annual passenger volumes through Phoenix airport rose by 25 per cent, pushing traffic on its single runway to unintended heights.
Last year, a record 16 million passengers travelled through the beleaguered airport, making it the 18th busiest in all of China. Sanya’s local government officials predict that this passenger traffic will soon eclipse 20 million annually.
Because of air traffic congestion from being forced to operate way in excess of its capacity, travellers to Phoenix Airport experience a logistical bottleneck rather than an efficient transport hub. Flight delays and cancellations are common occurrences, and this has had a detrimental impact on the city’s tourism sector. Reports in newspapers suggest that some Chinese tour groups have cancelled flights to Sanya because of the greater likelihood of delays at the airport.
Sanya has outlived the usefulness of its airport, and in order for the city’s annual 30 billion yuan (HK$35 billion) tourism sector to continue growing, a solution had to be found for this air transport problem. As Phoenix Airport has been expanded on numerous occasions to the stage where it has exhausted all future growth possibilities, a new airport has been deemed the logical answer.
