Fiji's airports

New look for Fiji's airports

By Sophie Foster

Hildebrand

WITH inc

reased air travel, the: first and last impression that visitors have of a country is the airport.

For Fiji, which has been reporting record numbers of visi tors to its shores of late, these vis itors arrive and depart through Nadi International Airport.

But while this may be good news for the tourism industry, for those who have to travel through the international airport, in most cases, the experience is not a good one.

This is one of the many rea sons why the country’s new air port operator, Airports Fiji Limited has decided to overhaul

the country’s major airports in ;

Nadi (right) and Nausori.

In July last year, the company commissioned local architects.

Architects Pacific for the “con cept replanning” of Nadi and Nausori airports. Rather than the

technical aspects of airports such as the runway, this replanning will see a change for the better to the terminal area of the air ports.

The head of Architects Pacific, Stuart Huggett, says Nadi Airport clearly isn’t coping with the flow through it and Nausori is even worse.

“A useful exercise to watch Nadi Airport function is to go there on a Saturday - the crowds are unbelievable. We are hoping to attract tourists into this coun try’s airport particularly through this sort of weather, it’s a nightmare,” he says.

The overhaul is a matter of urgency.

AFL decided to get a new check-in system at the terminals to control the huge crowds that go through.

Before they could implement that, they needed a concept of the whole terminal and a review.

Huggett says the new concept includes mostly extensions and modifications to the existing terminal rather than building a new terminal in both cases - Nadi and Nausori.

“But it amounts to major surgery, I think that’s the way to put it. People talk

about costs here but it's something that has to take place over quite an extended period of time.

It isn’t as though you can suddenly build a new air terminal, because it’s got to be carefully phased so that it stays opera tional the whole time,” he says.

Interestingly enough, the architects do not think Nadi Airport is too bad. Huggett says the total area of the building is almost adequate but just badly utilised and

planned.

Huggett, who became qualified in 1965 and has been in Fiji since 1969, there were a wide variety of issues that Architects Pacific had to consider.

“Firstly, of course, there’s the crowds at check-in, and getting the check-in working right. Then of course, the departure lounge is also awful at the moment. It’s just not big enough.

We need to have departure gates, we need to have that flight goes over there and that flight goes over there and so on,” he says.

The new departure gates will not be in separate rooms but will resemble “most

modem airports”.

The review also jooked at levels separat ing departures and arrivals but decided that that was not really an option.

I Architects Pacific, which was founded in 1971, worked on the project with Becker Carter in Auckland who are specialists in airport planning. Apart from getting the planning right, the new look Nadi and Nausori airports will be designed to make sure that arriving and depart ing impressions of Fiji are distinctive, unique and representative of Can exotic, tropical spe cial destination”, fc The plans will also overhaul the current

‘■ho-hum" shopping

experience at the inter national airport, r “What we’ve pro

posed is two shopping centres - there’d be the land side shopping centre, which would be air-conditioned, with restaurants, book shops, and a whole range of other shops. It would be open to everybody so that when you are saying good-bye to someone, you have somewhere to go that’s interesting.

The air side shopping centre, which is the duty-free shopping centre, would be bigger than the area that is given at the moment,” Huggett says.

One effect that the architects are push ing is dense tropical gardens at the airports.

“The trim Sydney lawn aesthetic is probably not really exotic enough. So we’re putting a lot more planting into the place. The buildings themselves, when extended and so on, would actually end up being interesting, tropical and so on with lots of timber and lots of bright colours, warmth, friendliness - all the stuff that one looks for when coming to the Fiji Islands,” he says.

If everything goes according to plan, work should begin this year. It will run in various phases, allowing the airports to function normally, and should be finished by 2002. ■

Plan of the proposed changes to the airport