The Nur-Sultan airport code was changed

Created on 08.04.2020 12:00

According to the Special Notice of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) on April 6, the final official decision was taken to change the existing three-letter code of Nursultan Nazarbayev International Airport to NQZ.

“This change will officially apply from June 8, 2020 and all airline booking systems, including tickets, luggage tags, and arrival/departure boards will use the new NQZ airport code”, said the CCA.

Negotiations to change the airport code began in 2017. The airport renamed in honor of Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Talgat Lastaev reported seeing suggestions from Kazakhstan about renaming the airport code in 2017.

“A number of versions has been developed, such as NIA (Nazarbayev International Airport), NNA (Nursultan Nazarbayev Airport) or NAN. Something has already taken, something’s not. For example, the NAN code is occupied by Fiji Island Airport, and the NNA code is the airport in Morocco.

Now we are looking at the appropriate codes and negotiating with IATA, but this is not a matter of a day, because the process of assigning the new code is very time-consuming. Firstly, the official position of the IATA - the code is assigned once and no longer changed, all the codes are missing (many requests from different countries), and second, the change of the codes will change all the reservation systems and worldwide directory", noted the Head of the CCA.

Airport codes are used by airlines, airline sales agencies, computer reservation systems, other interested organizations to transmit information, related to the organization of commercial activities in the field of passenger air transport and the interaction of different enterprises in this commercial activity.

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