Macau may be experiencing a slowdown, but the exclusive VIP facility at the Macau International Airport is doing brisk business with the steady stream of tycoons, board-level executives and global celebrities jetting into the territory.
“Business is quite good. “Guests like to fly in and out, and we facilitate this fluid movement. They are usually business people looking to park their aircraft here and then travel into the city or to Hongkong for corporate meetings,” said Christine Wong, assistant operations manager at the Macau Business Aviation Center (MBAC).
Most of the corporate and executive jets that land at MBAC mostly light aircraft like the Legacy and the Gulfstream 4. A few Boeing 767 planes have also landed on its tarmac.
The VIP facility is handling more than triple the number of private flights over the last three years – from 650 flights involving 1,100 passengers in 2005 to 900 flights involving 4,000 passengers as of October of this year.
“They want total privacy and don’t want to be noticed,” Wong noted, adding that MBAC staff are trained to offer an efficient service that tries to anticipate passengers’ needs. And the MBAC staff are strictly forbidden to ask for autographs from celebrity passengers.
She recalled singer Celine Dion and her husband Rene being pleasantly surprised by the absence of autograph seekers “One employee told them (nicely): ‘we are working’.”
As part of MBAC service, a luxury vehicle is waiting on the MBAC tarmac to transfer passengers to the MBAC terminal, which has its own customs and immigration facilites.
The airport is open 24 hours a day and has a staff of 16 working on shifts. A police detachment also provides round-the-clock security.
For more details, visit www.mbac.com.mo
Peter Rajendran
