Hardcore fans launch website, do Madurai airport proud on web

MADURAI: For a casual visitor, the website www.maduraiairport.in provides a wealth of reliable information which would be useful for any traveller or tour planner. Information on flight schedule, passengers' facilities, shopping, food and beverages, statistics, gallery, nearby tourist attractions, technical information and latest news about the airport fill the pages. What is amusing though is that the website is maintained by fans and not an official one.
While it is quite normal for any public facility to enjoy the bouquets and brickbats of its local people, Madurai International Airport’s hardcore fans have just not stopped with merely cheering the developments.They have launched a website to spread the word about their airport. Anyone who gets into the website would tend to think that it is an official website due to its appearance and the way the information is maintained. Most importantly, no advertisement is seen on the website. The fans have also been managing a Facebook page for the last three years.
“The website www.maduraiairport.in helps passengers to get a basic idea about the airport and flight details when there is no dedicated official website available. For a moment I thought the airport had got its official website, until I saw the declaration,” said S K Sarath, a frequenter from Madurai.
The fan following of the airport is well-known with the facebook page maintained by the same section of fans https://www.facebook.com/maduraiairport/ commanding close to 30, 000 followers. Every new flight taking off/landing, facility inaugurated and “every firsts” are being celebrated on the page. However, though they also maintain a recently started Twitter handle, it is yet to pick up fans. The pages are popular among Maduraiites living abroad too.
Developing such a professional website and its maintenance cost at least a lakh of rupees, says the managing director of Megsoft, a smallscale IT company based in Madurai, Sundar Megaraj. It was he along with doctor friend Mahendra Varman and Mohammed Mustafa, a teacher working in Dubai, who launched it. Megaraj says it is maintained by dedicated developers from his company. They took the Mumbai airport’s design as reference for the new one. “To make it more professional and keep off copyrights infringement, we purchased the template used for the website and it took close to two months to develop it,” says he. Although there were a good number of visitors, they were not going to solicit advertisements since they wanted to maintain a professional look for the website, he said.