Chaos at Kunming Airport

With China's growing travel and tourism industry, many new airlines and airports have opened up across the country. Extreme weather conditions, however, have been putting a dampener on the whole travel experience.

In Kunming, recent fog stranded about 10,000 travellers at the newly built international airport, and things turned nasty.

Angry passengers are trying to get through one of the boarding gates at Kumning Changshui Interntional airport. Inside, some have even occupied the check-in desk.

One passenger said, "We want to go home!"

This man has been stranded here for almost 40 hours.

He said, "We've been stranded the longest, so we should fly first. But the management at China Southern Airlines haven't given us a departure time."

"Our plane is already here at Kunming, but there are so many passengers stranded here, and they're all impatient to get through the gate. And in some cases passengers are at one waiting hall, but the plane is at a different location, so getting passengers to the right place has caused chaos."

The airline company has blamed the disorder on the shortage of boarding gates, but the airport disagrees.

Wang Xin, vice president of Yunnan Airport group, said, "More than 900 flights have been scheduled for today because of the extra passengers stranded at the airport. The normal airport capacity is only for 700 flights per day."

He says the additional 200 flights are for those travellers who've been stranded at the airport. But despite the extra measures, frustrations are running high.

One passenger said, "We haven't been given any information. There's not even any drinking water here and we've had to take whatever food we can get from other airline companies."

This airport cost over 23 billion yuan to build and it opened last June. It looks like any other world class airport from the outside. But it's fallen short of meeting travellers' basic needs.

Passenger said, "The loudspeakers haven't been used once to provide any information on flights. We had no idea our flights were going to be delayed, nobody has thought to tell us a thing in the last four and a half hours."

According to guidelines issued by China's central government, 82 new airports are expected to be built between 2011 and 2015, creating a flight network that will cover about 90 percent of the country by 2020.

It's a huge project, and from the experience here at Kunming, it's obvious how urgent emergency plans and personnel training are needed.

Wang said, "There are many lessons to learn from this experience. First, the ground facilities need to be improved and the staff need to be trained to deal with eventualities such as this. Second, we have to be prepared to cope with such large numbers of flights. Third, there's a lot of scope for improvement in the service we provide to travellers."

And it seems travellers here would agree, urgent improvements in customer service available to travellers are needed not just here, but at all the new airports opening up across the country.