Kotoka International Airport, Accra was announced as the winner of the Routes Africa Airport Marketing Awards last night at a tropical themed Networking Evening held at Cap Lazare in the Seychelles. This award is the final regional heat to the World Routes Awards which will take place in Abu Dhabi later this year. Almost 300 aviation professionals were gathered to witness the presentation of the awards and to take part in the largest Routes Africa event to date.

The Routes Airport Marketing Awards have become synonymous with recognising and rewarding the highest standards of marketing activities undertaken by airports. The awards work on the core principle that the people who are best placed to judge an airport’s marketing activities are the airlines. Airlines from the African region have spent the last few months voting for the airports they felt deserved to win and their votes were based on an airport’s marketing activities over the past year.

The winner, Kotoka International Airport, Accra has achieved a huge increase in passenger traffic from 1.4 million in 2010 to 1.8 million in 2011. The airport works closely with its stakeholders including its government and tourism authority, the result has been an increase in international passenger traffic of 14% in 2011.

They demonstrated a clear route development strategy and implementation process in their awards submission and illustrated clearly how they have worked with their airline customers. Winning this regional heat now enables them to be automatically shortlisted for the World Routes Awards due to be held in Abu Dhabi later this year.

David Stroud, Executive Vice President Airports, Routes said: “We are delighted that Kotoka has won this regional heat of our awards and will now compete with the other shortlisted airports in the World Routes Airport Marketing Awards later this year.”

The Routes Airport Marketing Awards are unique in the industry as all the nominated airports have been exclusively voted for by airlines. The airports send in submissions for our panel of judges to assess. This year’s shortlisted airports were; Ghana – Kotoka International Airport, Accra; Tanzania – Julius Nyerere International Airport, Dar es Salaam; Uganda – Entebbe International Airport; Gambia – Banjul International Airport; ACSA – O R Tambo International Airport, Johannesburg.

Entebbe International Airport was highly commended in this year’s awards, the judges commented that they had attracted a number of new carriers which included Qatar Airways, Nasair and Juba Airlines. There has also been frequency increases by South African Airways, KLM and Turkish Airlines.