Focusing on the rights and interests of passengers, China's top civil aviation authority has made improvement of the nation's civil aviation services its top priority, a senior official from the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China (CAAC) said Wednesday.

While pushing to formulate laws and regulations on safeguarding the rights and interests of passengers, the CAAC is urging domestic airlines, airports and other air-service enterprises to establish a commitment system to ensure their quality services, CAAC's Vice-Director Li Jun said.

"Regulation of the management of passenger complaints of air transport services and the criteria on assessing the quality of air transport services is being revised," Li said.

In the meantime, airlines, airports and other air-service enterprises are responsible for making service commitments to passengers and detail their responsibilities in situations such as flight delays, air-ticket changes and personal injuries during flights, he said.

Highlighting the significance of information transparency, the vice-director said that publication of the frequency of flights, passenger complaints and cargo transport accidents at intervals will help to improve civil aviation services.

Though the overall service quality of the nation's civil aviation enterprises has improved, passengers find improvement is still needed for the nation's air-service enterprises.

Zhou Wu from Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu Province, had to stay at the airport for seven hours on August 19 last year when he tried to take an Air Bus 320 flight to travel to Guilin in South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. To his indignation, the airline gave no convincing explanations about the delay.

"A system making compensations for flight delays must be set up to reduce the damages brought about by flight abnormalities," he said.

Feng Hong from Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, who takes frequent flights for business trips, also has the similar headache.

He advised that airlines must also have emergency plans in place to address urgent problems such as the omission of passengers during transfers.

The latest statistics from CAAC indicated that, in the past year, the nation's civil aviation enterprises received a total of 626 complaints, up by 44 per cent as compared with 2002.

Complaints concerning airline companies were at the top of the list, covering 68.8 per cent of submissions. Next were those involving air ticket sales, covering 18.5 per cent and those involving airport services ranked third, covering 11.56 per cent, the statistics say.

Passenger complaints about airlines chiefly focus on their poor services under abnormal circumstances -- flights which are delayed or called off, or planes experiencing mechanical failures, for example.

These types of complains totaled 159, covering 42.4 per cent of the total blame upon airline companies, according to the statistics.

In addition, in-flight broadcasts and entertainment services, luggage-delivery and transfer services were also on the list of passenger complaints.

(China Daily February 19, 2004)