Published on September 15, 2006 - The new airport has its soft opening today, but bosses must face some huge concerns - the main departure hall has only 100 seats and just four restrooms for men

The people behind the new Suvarnabhumi Airport love to boast about its numerous and impressive statistics and they have been doing so with some gusto for the past few weeks.

With the Bt150-billion airport's soft opening for some domestic flights by Thai Airways International starting this morning, here are some statistics that they don't want to boast about.

Question 1: How many toilets for men are there in the main departure hall, which is 444 metres long and about 50 metres wide, and a place where domestic and international passengers have to check in their luggage and get their boarding passes?

Some experts have told The Nation that given the volume of people passing through, there should be 200 or even 300. Are there that many at Suvarnabhumi?

The answer: there are 12 toilets and 16 urinals in four restrooms.

In fact, make that eight toilets as four of the 12 - one in each restroom - are set aside for the physically disadvantaged.

So if you're in a hurry, you might have to hop across to the nearby Novotel Suvarnabhumi Airport Hotel, which has 19 toilets alone on the ground floor.

In the words of Deputy Prime Minister Suriya Jungrungreangkit, Suvarnabhumi is "one of the most modern airports in the world with multiple distinctive features".

With tens of thousands of people departing each day, one of those "distinctive features" is bound to be long queues at the restrooms.

With the other three floors having about the same number of toilets, Suvarnabhumi is in danger of being labelled a farce come September 28.

Now on to question 2: On that very same fourth floor, the only departure hall, how many seats are there for the public to rest their weary bones?

A couple of thousand would seem reasonable, you'd think. But if you said 100 you'd be spot on the money. Not bad for a place where thousands will congregate each hour. "There are hardly any seats because passengers must stand," huffed an Airports of Thailand (AOT) information officer. "We want them to check in quickly and get to the retail space."

The uniformed staffer added: "We have received many complaints that the duty-free space is too large." At an enormous 20,000 square metres or more, that's a lot of ground to cover. You'll definitely need a seat afterwards.

A female Thai Airways ticket staffer complained: "There are too few seats and too many shops. It's not like an airport but more like a shopping mall."

When the chairman of the AOT board, Srisuk Chandransu, happened by just at that moment, he quickly shied away from The Nation's questions about toilets and public seating, saying he was a bit too busy. The Thai Airways staffer then aired some more concerns as the hours count down to the soft opening of the airport today. "We don't even know what number to call for a wheelchair or any other units for that matter. They haven't handed that over to us yet."

The complaint list began to get bigger: the central conveyor belt should automatically read a check-in tag, but if the tag is not attached properly the computer won't be able to read it and the bag most likely will end up in the wrong terminal.

"For every 50 pieces of test luggage, 20 went missing," said the staff member, who did not want to be identified. So, if a piece of luggage goes missing, what happens next, she was asked. Well, with the new centralised single conveyor system, it means more of a headache to trace it and re-channel it back to the right place. "We're trying to fix it," she said.

The woman staffer added an even more ominous note to the list of complaints. It seems many who will man the airport have not been trained yet. "Training is not completed yet," she said, in an echo of the many critics who feel the government wants the airport opened as soon as possible and at all costs so that it will reap a feel-good windfall ahead of the election.

And what about that most controversial of purchases for the airport, the state-of-the-art CTX X-Ray bomb scanners? Well, the consensus is that they may be good but they only scan luggage after it goes through the conveyor belt, meaning there is still a risk of a bombing, said another Thai Airways staffer.

One major difficulty for passengers boarding public buses to and from the airport is that they will have to off-load and re-load their luggage at the public transport centre. If you are a departing passenger, you will have to grab your bags from the bus and drag them to where your bus is specifically parked. Then you load on the bags and head to the main departure hall.

Oh, you should know that there are no trolleys to help you with this task. Nor air-conditioning to make it more comfortable for you. The AOT claims the shuttle service is "free", but passengers still have to pay airport fees.

"Yes, it's a problem," admits Kaetsuda Ho-morb, a driver on the new public bus link. "Nobody is talking about it ... but we do need the trolleys."

"It looks convenient but in a way it's not," said Darunee Suknakorn, one of the many "airport tourists" who have come to admire the new pride of the Kingdom.

Pravit Rojanaphruk
The Nation