Following complaints about over-pricing of taxi services at Sofia Airport and problems with airport capacity and noise along flight paths, The Sofia Echo questioned Sofia Airport EAD spokesperson Daniela Veleva.
On October 29, Veleva said that taxi companies OK Supertrans and Taxi-c-Express had been chosen, on a competition basis, to provide taxi services at the airport after complaints about over-pricing by some companies.
The airport recommended that only these companies be used so that passengers could avoid being ripped off.
“Terminal 1 is serviced entirely by OK Supertrans,” Veleva said. A stand, marked to make it easy to find, has been set up near the exit from the airport terminal. Inside the terminal an OK Supertrans office employee is based in the arrival sector. “He organises the presence of the taxis and controls the order in which they are rented,” Veleva said.
She said at Terminal 2 there were two taxi ranks, serviced by cars from the two companies. OK Supertrans and Taxi-c-Express also have booking offices to assist arriving passengers.
Asked about the airport’s capacity, Veleva said that currently the airport’s total capacity was 4.4 million passengers, made up of 1.8 million passengers a year, or 1260 an hour, for Terminal 1, and 2.6 million passengers a year, or 2200 an hour, for Terminal 2.
Low-cost carriers use Terminal 1, and Terminal 2 services all other flights.
“Both terminals have the possibility to take up more passengers than the current capacity,” she said.
Veleva declined to respond when asked whether Sofia Airport intends increasing the number of check-in desks and building new runways.
She said that the expected number of passengers for 2008 is 2.7 million, and for the next five years the prognosis is for further increases.
Meanwhile, on October 25 the Initiative Committee for Protection of the Population from Sofia Airport Activities (ICPPSAA) held a news conference and a protest. According to ICPPSAA the current airport is “expensive and not effective”.
The committee claimed that airport management was at its wit’s end and it was not able to respond to the constantly increasing number of tourists and passengers, and the worsening environmental problems caused to residents living nearby.
The group said that people living near the airport and its flight paths were “continuously tortured” by noise levels that exceeded acceptable limits, pollution and risks from material falling from aircraft and from potential accidents.
They said that a new airport was needed, not “not in the next 20 to 30, but in the next two to three years”.
ICPPSAA said that through public-private partnerships and for about 200 million to 300 million euro, Sofia could have “the most modern Balkan airport, and on the freed-up territory of the current airport, more than 30 billion euro can be put in to build a new Eastern European administrative and trade centre, with real parks, water areas, big boulevards in place of the current runways, and boroughs with the atmosphere of European countries”.
Veleva told The Sofia Echo that Sofia Airport management “considers with responsibility and care citizens’ complaints about the noise”.
She said that their requests were being analysed and discussed.
“Ways to decide the problem, that satisfy both civil rights protection and the possibility for effective execution of Sofia Airport EAD activities as an object of national and European significance, are being sought,” Veleva said.
