Immigration to open common inspection counter at KLIA

PUTRAJAYA: The Immigration Department will open a common counter for inspection in efforts to ease congestion during periods of high passenger traffic at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA).

Immigration director-general Mustafar Ali said the department, with assistance from the airport operator, Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd (MAHB), had set up a customer experience management (CEM) team to help direct passengers to the respective counters.

“The department is also taking measures by deploying officers who will act as ushers to ease passenger congestion at KLIA.

“In order to ensure a smooth flow of passengers and avoid congestion during inspection, the inspection counter will be divided into two categories, namely the permanent counter and the support counter.

“This proposal is to ensure that the immigration inspection counter can be opened 100% without fail,” he said in a statement yesterday.

On Tuesday, Mustafar jointly chaired a tripartite meeting with MAHB managing director Badlisham Ghazali involving the Immigration Department, MAHB and the Airlines Operators Committee (AOC) at KLIA, Sepang.

Among the issues discussed was the improvement of services at KLIA and klia2.

Badlisham in a separate statement said the new common counter system would work well following the previous counter guiding light system which was installed in September last year.

“The counter guiding light system serves as a method to quickly usher passengers to the next counter as soon as it becomes available. This has been proven to reduce passenger queueing time significantly,” he said.

Badlisham also said that the airport operator is piloting a digital initiative with the Immigration Department as part of a bigger digitalisation initiative at the airport, to improve total airport experience for all airport users.

“We need to properly understand and analyse our data so that we can all work together with one common objective to serve our passengers better.

“Thus, we will be working closely with all parties to attain the necessary data to facilitate the automation of passenger queue management,” he said.

He said the Immigration Department had also committed to 30 counters which would be opened and manned around the clock at the arrival level, and 10 counters at the departure level of the KLIA main terminal. -FMT