Fiumicino, 16 February 2018 – Rome joins in with Chinese New Year celebrations. Boarding Area E at Fiumicino Airport kicked off the Year of the Dog with a popular celebration involving passengers, airlines and airport operators in the Lion Dance, performed by a team of 10 artists with traditional red lanterns.

In 2017, the Rome airport – certified “Welcome Chinese” – registered a record number of passengers travelling to and from China, with 750,000 people flown to 10 destinations (Beijing, Xi'an, Chongqing, Haikou, Wuhan, Guangdong, Shanghai, Wenzhou, Hong Kong and Taipei), making Fiumicino the leading European airport alongside Frankfurt for the number of direct connections to Chinese cities. This record led Alipay, a Chinese online payment platform, to choose Leonardo da Vinci airport as its partner to launch an exclusive promotion for its passengers during Chinese New Year, in view of the wide and diversified commercial offer present in the airport’s terminals.

Thanks to the “Random Discount 2018 RMB” initiative, Fiumicino’s passengers – if they make purchases with Alipay over the value of 5 RMB in the non-Schengen area until 28 February – can obtain a discount in real time, up to a maximum of 2018 RMB (around €257). The “discount” is random and can only be obtained once for purchases made in the same store. Major brands are taking part in the initiative, including several luxury and shopping stores in International Area E, alongside restaurants in the Italian Food Street. 

This initiative joins those launched by ADR to make the airport even more welcoming for Chinese visitors, and adds to other active services, from information and commercial signs to Chinese language versions of the website and app, to the Personal Shopper service, in which ADR employees provide assistance in Chinese, accompanying passengers during their airport shopping experience.

Aeroporti di Roma is also one of the first international airports to have opened an official channel on WeChat, a social network which has reached over 938 million users in China in just a few years, nearly 850 million of which are active every day and with over 93% penetration. An active official profile on WeChat offers the airport the possibility to directly detect people planning a trip to Italy and promote Fiumicino and the city of Rome with initiatives, services, offers and useful information about stays in the capital and transit through the airport.

Aeroporti di Roma, an Atlantia Group company, manages and develops the airports of Rome Fiumicino and Ciampino and carries out other activities related and complementary to airport management. Fiumicino operates through three passenger terminals. It is dedicated to business and leisure customers on national, international and intercontinental routes; Ciampino is mainly used by low-cost airlines, express couriers and for General Aviation activities. In 2017, ADR recorded, as an airport system, 46,9 million passengers with over 230 destinations worldwide that can be reached from Rome, thanks to around 100 airlines operating at the two airports.

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