The Cape Town International Airport has announced the rollout of several changes and improvements that’ll be introduced in the coming years.

Last week, Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) held its first media briefing since 2019, where it revealed that passenger numbers, and flight volumes have returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Cape Town International Airport’s regional general manager Mark Maclean says international travel volumes have recovered to pre-Covid levels, while domestic travel is at 72%.

“We’re 100% recovered compared to pre-Covid, 2019, and we’ve been talking about what we can expect going forward.” says Maclean.

Improvements at the CTIA

Maclean says plans are in place to expand and improve services at the facility, such as building an additional runway, and using technology to speed up the check-in system.

“As we’re growing or rebuilding, we obviously need to bring back a lot of the major projects that we put on hold just before Covid hit us, and that’s a new international terminal, the expansion of our domestic terminal, and then also a new runway. We are hopeful that in the next 5 years, we’ll be able to at least bring some of those projects back.”

Just last week, the airport scooped its 8th consecutive award for the Best Airport in Africa, at the Skytrax World Airport Awards.

It also achieved the honours of ‘Best Airport Staff in Africa’ and ‘Cleanest Airport in Africa’.

To further improve services at the airport, its system will eventually switch from fingerprint scanning to facial recognition, and will allow international travelers to register to use E-gates at the airport.

“In total, we have installed 6 E-gates at arrivals immigration and 4 at departures emigration. This will provide several benefits, including increased processing rate at immigration and reduced waiting times. This’ll result in a vastly improved passenger experience. The next steps in this project will be to interface the E-gates with new BMCS system at the Department of Home Affairs.”

There are currently 21 international and 5 domestic carriers operating at the CTI airport. Among the new airlines are Air Belgium, Virgin Atlantic, Air Mauritius, United Airlines and Delta.

READ MORE: Cape Town International Airport wins big (again!) at Skytrax World Airport Awards