Travellers flying off from Changi Airport, you better watch the clock and keep track of your boarding time as the Singaporean international airport will be halting its final call announcements for boarding as well as paging for late passengers starting 2018.
Commencing on Jan 1 2018, Changi Airport will strictly filter its airport announcements and will only prioritise crucial announcements like those related to emergencies, lost and found children and passports, flight delays, gate changes and belt changes.
Changi Airport Group (CAG) spokesman Ivan Tan mentioned, “With more flights and passengers, maintaining the present frequency of announcements will mean noisier terminals and more interruptions in time to come.”
With an average of one announcement made about every five minutes, passengers may accidentally ignore important announcements that they should take note of. Hence, CAG made the decision to cease certain announcements to help ensure that passengers and visitors will pay attention to the essential ones.
The filtering of announcements also serves to remind passengers to plan ahead and be at the boarding gates on time as many would take it as granted to show up late. People should really learn about time management anyway.
Despite so, passengers need not to worry too much as you’ll be reminded about your boarding time during the check-in process and this will be emphasised to you, as requested by CAG to adapt for the change.
There will also be flight information displayed around the airport and digitally on the Changi Airport website and iChangi app about the cessation of final calls, to make sure that everyone is well-informed. Changi Airport is also equipped with 600 analogue and digital clocks in both public and transit areas, so blaming your faulty watch wouldn’t be the best excuse.
Changi Airport is definitely not the first to start this ‘silent airport’ trend as many international airports like the Hong Kong International Airport, Hamad International Airport in Doha and the Brussels Airport have started filtering their airport announcements for emergency and security reasons only.
It’s probably a good thing because it forces us to plan ahead of time when travelling anyway! The amount of times we have been left running madly across the terminal is unimaginable though. Guilty as charged..
