A long immigration queue at Chek Lap Kok International Airport just after 5.30 pm on August 18, 2012. Red Door News

The Immigration Department is seeking more manpower amid complaints that not enough counters at Chek Lap Kok are manned. Red Door News

Immigration officials are seeking additional manpower to deal with the long queues for arriving visitors at Hong Kong International Airport. Will it be enough to stop the bitter complaints from fed-up travellers, asks Simon Parry?

He is clearly one of Hong Kong International Airport's biggest fans. He loves its facilities, its shops and its restaurants and uses them regularly on his stopovers between Taipei and Europe and the Middle East, and awards the airport an overall personal rating of nine out of 10.

But in his review of the airport on the popular travellers' website Skytrax, posted on October 11, Taiwan-based businessman Mr Oussalah has one major issue over Chek Lap Kok: The immigration queues that he has to endure when he breaks his journey for a brief stop in Hong Kong.

"They are getting worse and becoming a real annoyance," he writes, going on to describe them as "by far the worse I have seen in Asian airports".

"There are simply not enough officers for the volume of passengers passing through," Mr Oussalah argues. "Clearing immigration takes me on average 40 minutes which might be acceptable (by) US and European standards but not in the second best airport in the world."

Mr Oussalah is not the only traveller to have his experience of flying into Hong Kong marred by long queues at immigration and frustration at the fact that only a handful of counters appear to be open.

At the end of August, a Mr Benson from the UK posted on the same site: "I've been through Hong Kong many times and never faulted it until this time when immigration queues were a disgrace.

"Barely a quarter of the desks were open, resulting in an hour's wait to get my passport stamped. I thought London Heathrow had problems but they were nothing in Hong Kong. (I'm) very disappointed as I've never had any issues with (Hong Kong) before."

One week earlier, a passenger from Jordan posted: "I arrived in the late evening when the immigration area was crowded with what must have been thousands of passengers. It took exactly one hour and 10 minutes to pass through with only four or five immigration officers actually at desks which is nothing for such a huge airport.

"There were about three or four other officers just walking around directing people and managing queues which would probably not actually be necessary if they just got behind a desk and stamped passengers' passports instead."

The China Daily highlighted the problem of long queues for non-residents at Chek Lap Kok in December last year when the chairman of the Hong Kong Tourism Board wrote to the director of immigration to express his concern at arriving tourists waiting for up to an hour to reach a counter.

Tien said at the time: "We aim to be Asia's World City. We have one of the most efficient cities in the world but queues at immigration in the airport are probably the most inefficient part of Hong Kong - and unfortunately this is the first impression many people have of Hong Kong."

Now, as complaints continue to pour out on travellers' websites, legislator for the tourism sector Paul Tse Wai-chun has called for extra immigration staff to be hired to deal with the problem.

Tse said he believed the root of the problem was overstretched resources and manpower in a department struggling to cope with huge increases in the volume of people crossing into Hong Kong, particularly over land borders with the mainland, and an "acute lack" of staff.

"I have heard from immigration department employees that they are having to take on more and more work," he said. "There is a general problem at all these border checkpoints ... They are badly in need of extra staff."

In a written response to the China Daily, the immigration department acknowledged for the first time it is seeking additional staff to help deal with the queues at Chek Lap Kok.

"We will continue to explore ways to further improve our service including bidding for extra manpower resources in accordance with the laid down procedures," the department said in a statement.

However, despite the anecdotal evidence and the angry online postings from travellers, the department - which refused repeated requests from the China Daily for an interview with a senior official - claimed that from January to the end of August, 95 percent of incoming non-resident passengers reached a counter within 15 minutes.

Complaints about service standards at the airport also remained low with only 11 in 2010, nine in 2011 and five in the first eight months of 2012, the statement said, adding that only one of the 2011 complaints was about the length of the queue.

From January to August, more than 25 million passengers had cleared immigration at Chek Lap Kok - seven percent more than during the same period in 2011. August arrivals were meanwhile six percent higher than for the corresponding month a year earlier, the statement said.

"Nonetheless, the department has maintained its pledge to clear 95 percent of visitors within 15 minutes," it claimed. "Although this can be achieved overall, we are aware that some passengers might have experienced longer queuing during certain daily peak hours and festive periods."

One measure the department was taking to reduce queues was an increasing promotion of Frequent Visitor e-channels which allow regular visitors to pass through e-channels similar to those used by ID card holders, said the statement.

Daily enrolment numbers have shot up 370 percent from an average of 36 a day up to the end of April to 169 a day in August, while daily use of the Frequent Visitor e-channels has gone up from 1,225 to 1,751 a day over the same period - an increase of 43 percent. More than 91,000 regular visitors have now signed up to the scheme.

The statement said that the number of e-channels for Frequent Visitors would be doubled from six to 12 this year in response to the scheme's increasing popularity.

Other measures to help cut the queues included the flexible deployment of staff, staff reinforcements from headquarters, redeployment of backroom office staff, arranging for staff to work overtime and reducing the number of employees on leave during holiday periods, the statement added.

A spokesperson for the Airport Authority said: "Over the years, the authority has worked closely with the Immigration Department and made efforts to modify our facilities to facilitate the immigration clearance process with a view to providing quality passenger services.

"For instance, in 2010, we completed the merging of two arrival immigration halls into one. The modification has not only provided passengers with greater convenience but also enabled Immigration Department to deploy their manpower resources more efficiently.

"In August 2012, we modified the airport staff entry gate at the arrival immigration hall, which has enabled Immigration Department to redeploy officers manning the staff entry gate to other job tasks including counters."

The authority made sure there was sufficient hardware to meet demand, the spokesperson added. There are currently 120 immigration counters and 18 e-channels available at the arrival level at Chek Lap Kok.

The spokesperson added: "Since the provision of immigration service falls under Immigration Department's jurisdiction, we have been relaying complaints and our observations regarding the processing time of arrival passengers to the Immigration Department.

"We received 11 enquiries about the time taken to undergo immigration clearance in HKIA from January to September this year. Last year, a total of 20 enquiries were received."

Today's travellers, however, are more likely to make their feelings known through a website like Skytrax than by going through the bureaucratic process of lodging official complaints with the airport authority or immigration department.

And a quick look at those postings indicates that, while most travellers rate Hong Kong International Airport extremely highly overall, some are deeply unhappy at the length of time they have to wait to reach an immigration desk.

People like regular visitor Ian Morris from Australia who warned fellow travellers in May: "If you arrive at a peak time - nightmare city. Long, long queues to get through immigration; Up to 45 minutes is possible, and most of my experience here is of this time length."

Or Wee Kiat Lim from Singapore who posted in August: "This is the most overrated airport in the world. My experience was bad from the moment I touched down. It took me one hour to clear immigration. Despite the long lines, more than half of the counters remained closed."

(HK Edition 10/16/2012 page4)