THE operators of Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston say they are addressing grievances about broken air conditioning units in the terminal buildings, malfunctioning toilets, defective parking machines, and leaks.

Sitara English-Byfield, chief executive officer of PAC Kingston Airport Limited (PACKAL), gave the assurance at a forum staged by PACKAL on Friday after the airport took a beating from disgruntled passengers in 2023, which has been pegged by experts as the hottest year on record.

The complaints resulted in Transport Minister Daryl Vaz calling PACKAL to book and director general of Jamaica Civil Aviation Authority (JCAA) Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Derby charging the operators to pull out all the stops to enhance passenger comfort.

On Friday, English Byfield said the company had purchased four new chillers at a cost of US$2 million. She said all four “have been fully installed, commissioned and are officially working”.

She also said the company has continued with its cooling improvements, installing five package units, and will install another three early next year in addition to the chillers.

“We have a project to replace some of our air condition units; we have about 55 in the airport. We are planning to replace about 27 that are non-functioning or as not as optimal. We have done eight so far and we have another 10 coming, so it will get colder,” she said, adding that the restroom renovations are continuing.

Kathryn Prendergast, director of maintenance at PACKAL, said issues with the airport’s escalator, located at its western end, and an elevator at the check-in area, have been resolved.

Regarding widespread discomfort with leaks in the airport’s roofing, Prendergast said roof renovations now under way will make “airport leaks a thing of the past”.

“We are hoping that by the first quarter of 2025 I will have no buckets catching water in my airport,” she said.

Meanwhile, Kaydian Dawes Wynter, commercial and car park manager, said the department began formal tracking of its pay stations in July this year, in the wake of complaints.

“The pay stations overall have met the target of 95 per cent availability most of the times, save and except for one [located in the arrivals section] which has been out of service from July. We are working assiduously to have that repaired; it’s an issue with the circuit board,” she said.

Dawes Wynter said the pay stations typically go out of service from time to time whenever there is an attempt to insert damaged notes in them.

She said some of the issues being experienced with the pay stations are also a result of the salty air environment. As a consequence, the units are to be encased similar to how ABMs are housed, come 2025.

Airports Authority of Jamaica (AAJ) President and Chief Executive Officer Audley Deidrick said PACKAL’s fifth year in existence can be “characterised as a celebration of survival over its formative years”, given the fact that its experience and performance have “suffered serious reputational bruises”.

He said the forum would reveal that they have made significant progress in addressing “the major setbacks that had negatively affected the airport’s service quality”.

Commenting on the current state of aviation traffic and the industry after the COVID-19 pandemic, Deidrick said 2023 showed a “remarkable performance” and represents a year of full recovery, with Jamaica hosting a total seven million passengers versus 6.5 million in 2019 — a recovery of seven per cent.

He said Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay recorded traffic of 5.2 million passengers last year versus 4.7 million in 2019, an 11 per cent increase, while NMIA posted 1.7 million passengers last year versus 1.8 million in 2019, a shortfall of five per cent.

He said while “this remarkable traffic growth and recovery in 2023 was expected to continue in 2024, this was not to be, as the year 2024 has seen a slump in the traffic growth compared to both budget and last year”.

“Hence, as at October, total traffic was 5.7 million passengers for the country versus budget of 6.2 million passengers and last year to date of 5.8 million, representing downturn of 6.8 per cent below budget and two per cent below last year. This is the reality we are facing,” he said.

Deidrick said based on this year-to-date performance, the forecast for 2024 is now total traffic of 6.9 million versus 7.1 million in 2023, a downturn of two per cent.

“The impact of our aviation traffic downturn for 2024 versus 2023, driven mainly by the downturn reported in the tourism industry and its impact on our economic performance as a whole, is well reported… we also know that travel and tourism represent approximately 30 per cent of this country’s GDP. It’s not a joke matter,” the AAJ head said.

Last December, then PACKAL Chief Executive Officer Fernando Vistrain Lorence — now GAP country manager — had said work was ongoing to settle the issues.

“We are going to identify the company that is going to provide us with the new chillers before the end of December. We have four chillers [for the units] that inject the air into the terminals, so once we have the contract with this company we are expecting that the chillers will arrive in Jamaica between three to four months. So before the middle of the year we are expecting to have brand new equipment, so everybody can be sure that there will be no further issues with the AC system,” he said.

He had also pledged that the malfunctioning toilets were being worked on, while car park improvements and the upgrading of parking stations were also under way.

NMIA, which is the primary gateway for business travel to and from Jamaica and for the movement of air freight, caters to more than 1.7 million passengers and handles over 70 per cent (17 million kilograms) of the island’s air cargo each year.

PACKAL has operated NMIA under a 25-year concession agreement since 2019 and has the responsibility to operate and maintain the entity, improve the efficiency of landside and airside operations, and finance and complete the planned modernisation programme.