Named best airports in Europe

It is the international industry organisation for airports, ACI, that has sent Avinor’s two largest airports to the top of the list. The reason is the airports’ strong developments in the customer service survey ASQ (Airport Service Quality), which is conducted monthly and used actively at most airports worldwide.

Recognition we are proud of
Oslo wins the award ‘Europe’s best airport for customer service’ along with the airports in Zürich and Dublin in the category for airports with between 25 and 40 million passengers, while Bergen Airport wins the category for airports with between 5 and 15 million passengers, along with the airports in Alicante (Spain), Bristol (UK), Sochi (Russia), Keflavik (Iceland), Luqa (Malta), Newcastle (UK) and Porto (Portugal). Bergen Airport was also named the airport with the greatest improvement in 2018 in Europe in its category.
Overall, Avinor will be presented with three awards at the ceremony that will take place on 4 September 2019.

“This is recognition we are very proud of, and proves that everyone working at our airports makes an excellent contribution to giving the passengers a good experience. Avinor’s two largest investments in recent years have been the developments at Oslo Airport and Bergen Airport. Now we are seeing the results of this. The fact that Bergen wins an award for ‘greatest improvement’ in customer services is of course viewed in the light of the development, and now the entire region has an airport to be proud of,” says CEO of Avinor Dag Falk-Petersen.

Falk-Petersen points to Avinor’s strategic choice of focusing on the passengers’ travel experiences as decisive for the awards Oslo and Bergen are now receiving.
“Since 2013 we have strategically worked to improve the travel experience at all of our airports , and these awards show that we have done something right. This is very inspiring and will be used as motivation to become even better in the future,” Falk-Petersen concludes.

The award is for the employees
Airport Director at Oslo Airport, Øyvind Hasaas, is of the opinion that the award is a feather in the cap for all employees at the airport and believes it will inspire even better results in the time ahead.

“After opening ‘new Oslo Airport’ back in 2018 we have won several awards, but I think this is the best one so far. It proves that the link between good infrastructure and the people who work at the airport is decisive for creating good travel experiences. We shall use this as inspiration so that the passengers can look forward to meeting dedicated and service-minded employees here in the future,” Hasaas says.

In Bergen there is of course also great satisfaction with feedback from the passengers.
“This is important recognition for Bergen Airport Flesland. When we opened the new terminal at Bergen Airport on 17 August 2017, we were looking forward to giving western Norway the airport terminal it deserves. After so many years in a tight space, now the experience is completely different. But most importantly, all employees in all companies are working together and doing their utmost so the everyone travelling to and from Flesland has a safe, comfortable and pleasant trip,” says Øystein Skaar, acting airport director at Bergen Airport Flesland.

Avinor will accept the awards for Bergen and Oslo at a ceremony in connection with ‘Customer Experience Global Summit’ in September.

Facts:
ACI (Airports Council International) is the industry organisation for most of the airports in the world, and every year 640,000 individual surveys are conducted at 400 airports in 47 languages in 91 countries. These surveys are called ASQ (Airport Service Quality) and are continuously carried out at the member airports. In the Avinor system it is the airports in Oslo, Bergen, Stavanger, Trondheim, Tromsø, Bodø, Ålesund and Kristiansand who conduct the survey. The results for Oslo and Bergen are based on more than 5,000 interviews in 2018.

ASQ (Airport Service Quality)
ASQ comprises 55 questions, including 34 where the passengers are asked to rank specific service-related features/topics and their general satisfaction with the airport on a scale from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent). The remaining questions are related to the passengers’ profile and the air trip they are taking.
As of January 2019, ACI had 646 members with 1,960 airports in 176 countries.