Tourism bottleneck: relief on the way as work is due to start on new airport later this year
The city has outlived the usefulness of Phoenix International Airport, a facility originally designed to handle 1.5 million passengers a year – but saw 16 million visitors pass through its gates last year
As an ever-increasing number of tourists pour into Sanya each year, the need for a new airport that can handle growing passenger volumes has become evident.
Sanya’s Phoenix International Airport, which was built more than 20 years ago, was originally designed to cope with a maximum 1.5 million passengers a year. As the city’s tourism industry grew at an extremely fast pace through the latter half of the 2000s, annual passenger volumes through Phoenix airport rose by 25 per cent, pushing traffic on its single runway to unintended heights.
Last year, a record 16 million passengers travelled through the beleaguered airport, making it the 18th busiest in all of China. Sanya’s local government officials predict that this passenger traffic will soon eclipse 20 million annually.