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Air travel is no longer considered a luxury or a novelty. Gone are the days when flying was called a “godlike act” — a term used by Charles Lindbergh, the first human to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.

If you have ever been to Terminals 1 and 2 of Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Cengkareng, or Ngurah Rai International Airport in Denpasar, you know well how gloomy and unwelcoming they are. A passenger that goes by the name of C. Ng reviewing Soekarno-Hatta recently wrote on the Skytrax Web site: “The building is claustrophobic and dark, signage is limited or absent, the air-conditioner struggles to maintain coolness and toilets are filthy.”

The immigration facilities are inadequate and lines can be long: “the international terminal is a disgrace for Indonesia” another passenger commented. It is unfortunate that inefficient, outdated and cumbersome airports can successfully project an image that rational and modern Indonesians would rather distance themselves from.

In contrast to airports in Indonesia, malls project a starkly different picture of Indonesia: fresh, professional, courteous and efficient. Many shopping centers in Indonesia are good examples of functionality, efficiency and good services. Their designs are not only pleasing to the eye but make it easy for customers to get around. One can easily locate and go to that one perfume shop on the way to the cinema to watch that blockbuster movie everyone is talking about. On top of that, the prices for comparable goods and services are competitive.

It is bewildering, then, to notice that over the course of a few decades, malls have evolved much better in terms of quality, choice, theme and service than the airports here. Malls evolved from relatively small shopping centers such as Sarinah in the 1960s, to Aldiron Plaza in the 1970s and finally to the huge, luxurious shopping centers of today — think Mall of Indonesia or Grand Indonesia Shopping Town. These shopping centers would not be out of place in Tokyo, Beijing or Hong Kong.

At the same time, general airports have for years been struggling to provide even the most basic services and facilities for millions of passengers. All of these passengers are paying customers, by the way.

Walk and look around Senayan City. And then contrast that to your most recent experience disembarking from an airplane at Soekarno-Hatta. If you are lucky, you walked out of the plane via a passenger boarding bridge. If not a bus may have had to shuttle you from the plane to a terminal, such as Terminal 2.

Once inside the terminal, you were greeted by drab colors in a low-ceilinged building. Tissues may not be available in the toilets. And as you went through immigration and ended up at the baggage carrousels, airport staff may have helped you or just acted indifferently, depending on their mood that day. Add to that the long baggage wait and standing in line to get a taxi. Just thinking about the ordeal is enough to exhaust any traveler.

These inefficiencies cannot be tolerated. Especially not in a large, emerging country where the middle class is growing and has an increasing appetite for travel. The president of the International Civil Aviation Organization, Roberto Kobeh Gonzales, on a visit to Indonesia last year, said the aviation industry here was the world’s third largest. According to the Transportation Ministry, the number of airline passengers in 2011 was 66 million, a jump of 15 percent from 2010.

So why does Indonesia not yet have truly world-class airports like New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport or Beijing Capital International Airport? A quick browse through Skytrax customer reviews of Indira Gandhi Airport and the words most often repeated are “impressed, improved, high international standards, clean toilets,” and so on. And Beijing airport? It ranks number five in Skytrax World’s Best Airport 2011.

Clearly, Beijing, New Delhi and other cities in Asia such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Incheon and Kuala Lumpur understand the importance of airports and the essential services they provide to local communities, the nation and the region. They recognized early on that a well-developed airport can connect citizens, spread ideas and innovation as well as help attract — and keep — national and global corporations. Those cities and countries invested heavily to build world-class airports that meet and even exceed international standards on cleanliness, timeliness, services, navigation and the simplicity of travel to and from a city’s center.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has a vision to transform Indonesia and place it among the top 10 largest economies by 2030. To back this up, there is the Master Plan for the Acceleration and Expansion of Indonesia’s Economic Development (MP3EI). Infrastructure development, including airports and seaports, is important to support the development of the six economic corridors of Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Bali-Nusa Tenggara and Papua.

It is thus a good sign that a number of airports in Indonesia have been modernized and upgraded, like Lombok and Makassar international airports, while some others are in the process of major renovations: Ngurah Rai and Soekarno-Hatta. It is not too late to catch up and emulate the successes of our neighbors in developing their airports.

A short hop to Kuala Lumpur International Airport is all it takes to remind ourselves that our airports have much to improve on. But I am optimistic and looking forward to a day, in the not-so-distant future, when we can easily roam through our world-class airports. To a day when immigration checks are efficient, facilities are exciting and clean, while the five-star management and staff deliver excellent services. And then, we can proudly say that our airports are a tribute to Indonesia and its people. If malls can do it, so can airports.

I.B. Made Bimantara is deputy assistant to the Special Staff of the President of Indonesia for International Affairs. The views expressed are his own.