It may be old hat now, but it bears mentioning in this column that Michael O’Leary, the mampara who runs Ryanair, finally regained his marbles and has been experiencing a prolonged period of lucidity for the past couple of months: the low-cost Irish airline no longer requires South African passport holders wishing to fly with it to prove their nationality by passing an Afrikaans test.
As readers of this column would recall, O’Leary thought he would do his bit to combat the scourge of fraudulently acquired South African travel documents being used by unscrupulous elements by requiring that would-be travellers departing from its Irish base and destined for the UK or other European destinations demonstrate proficiency in Afrikaans before being allowed on board – if they purported to be South African citizens. A noble idea, but the means to achieve this goal definitely resides in the realm of mamparadom. In a country where Afrikaans is the mother tongue of a mere 12% of a population of about 60-million people, how on earth could anyone expect every single citizen to be able to speak Afrikaans?
Ryanair’s decision sparked outrage, even in the corridors of power in South Africa, with a government spokesperson describing the move as a “backward profiling system”. Being the mampara that he is, O’Leary initially refused to scrap the policy, citing a surge in fake South African passports on a route between Ireland and Türkiye and arguing that the airline received a hefty fine for every passenger found to have travelled on a fraudulently acquired passport.
O’Leary eventually relented; that was more than two months ago. So, that “backward profiling system” is now water under the bridge.
Anyone who has done any amount of international travel would testify that presenting oneself at immigration may be akin to running a gauntlet of ill-treatment, if one is so unfortunate as to be served by an officer who is in the position to collect a pay cheque at the end of the month instead of rendering a service. I’m glad Ryanair eventually came to its senses, thus sparing air travellers a potential additional nasty experience.
Indeed, a study undertaken by academics at the UK’s Loughborough University identified immigration control as one of the biggest “pains” in an air passenger’s journey. The study found that passengers’ main gripes about the UK’s immigration control were long delays, disorderly queues and general dissatisfaction with the immigration control process.
It would appear that travellers who pass through most of the world’s other big airports are more or less as dissatisfied with immigration officials at these facilities as are travellers to the UK with immigration officers at that country’s airports. According to the results of the 2022 iteration of the Skytrax World Airport Awards – the world’s largest yearly airport customer satisfaction survey – Copenhagen Airport, in Denmark, and Zurich Airport, in Switzerland, are the only European airports featured in the top ten from an immigration service point of view. The other eight top-ranked airports are all from Asia. These are Singapore’s Changi Airport; Incheon Airport, in the South Korean capital city of Seoul; Kansai, Tokyo Narita and Tokyo Haneda airports, all in Japan; Doha Hamad Airport, in Qatar; and Hong Kong Airport.
It’s a pity that in South Africa legitimate complaints have also been laid against immigration officials. I recall an American author tweeting earlier this year that immigration officials at Cape Town International Airport threatened to not let her into the country – to address a major literary event – simply because her passport had fewer than three unstamped pages. Her attempts to phone the US consulate to arrange for a new passport were construed as insolence and aggravated the situation. She was eventually let in, though.