Han Ximin

AIR travelers who check in at the Futian Transport Hub can enjoy free parking with the opening of the first airport waiting hall inside Shenzhen Special Economic Zone yesterday.

Five counters on the first floor of the transport hub were put into service yesterday. Travelers using the Shenzhen airport can check in for their flights, buy tickets and insurance and read the latest information about inbound and outbound flights on a digital screen. More importantly, they don’t need to pay for car parking.

“Passengers can park their cars in any of the 600 public parking places for free with an air ticket or boarding pass,” said Zhang Liang, director of the Shenzhen Road Transport Service Center, which operates the waiting hall.

The waiting hall at Futian is the 14th of its kind that the Shenzhen airport has opened in Pearl River Delta cities.

After check-in, travelers can take shuttle buses to the Shenzhen airport. The buses operate from 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. at 30-minute intervals. A promotion is being offered during the trial period until Oct. 4, during which the bus trip is 10 yuan per person for group travelers and 12 yuan for individual travelers, Zhang said. The price increases to 20 yuan per person after the trial period.

Passengers, however, cannot check in their luggage at the waiting hall. Instead, their luggage goes through a special lane reserved for VIPs at the airport, saving their time. Zheng Yonghui, a tour guide with Shenzhen Airlines International Travel Service, who was helping check-in service at the hub yesterday for his 30 tourists to Harbin, hoped the airport would open a luggage check-in service for the convenience of travelers.

Huang Chuanqi, president of Shenzhen Airport Group, said the airport is seeking approval from the Southern Bureau of the Civil Aviation Administration of China to check in luggage at the Futian hub. The airport must be able to monitor the luggage all the way from the waiting hall to the airport for security reasons.

“The waiting hall extends the airport service and saves costs and time for passengers for its very convenient traffic,” Huang said.

The travel time for the shuttle bus to the airport is about 30 minutes.

Huang said that more than 1 million travelers had used the airport’s waiting hall services at Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Macao and Hong Kong in 2008, and this number is expected to hit 1.5 million this year. From January to May, Shenzhen airport handled 10 million passengers, an 11.4 percent increase compared with the same period last year.

The airport will open another waiting hall at Shenzhen Bay Checkpoint within the year.