ghanaweb-news.com

Commentary · Aviation · Digital Ghana · 7 November 2026

Ghana Airports Company Limited made a net profit of GH¢355.94 million in 2025. Since 1 April 2026, every passenger leaving Accra on an international flight pays an extra US$100 for airport infrastructure. In September the company announced it had won two awards "on the global stage". So what does its website, the first thing millions of travellers see of Ghana's airports, actually look like? We checked on 7 November 2026.

COVID-19 is still a main menu item

Open gacl.com.gh and the top navigation reads: Airport Guide, Business, News, Contact, and COVID-19 Update. Behind it are travel guidelines, a health declaration form, a link to pay for a COVID test and a list of approved laboratories. Ghana dropped these rules long ago. Google still pulls them into the company's search results, so a traveller searching for Accra airport today can be told to pay for a test that no longer exists.

What the homepage does not mention is the change that actually matters right now. Since 25 May 2026, most foreign visitors need an approved e-visa or electronic travel authorisation before they board a flight to Ghana. The country's main airport operator gives that no space on its front page, but it still has room for COVID.

Numbers from another era

• Traffic statistics: the "Air Traffic Statistics" link leads to a page whose address contains traffic-statistics-2019.
• Passenger figure: the homepage quotes "an average of 7,780 passengers daily". GACL's own figure for 2025 was about 3.6 million passengers, roughly 9,900 a day.
• Copyright: the footer still reads "© 2023 GACL".

A template nobody finished

The site runs on WordPress with a ready-made theme bought from an online template market. Parts of the demo were never cleaned up:

• A "Plan Your Stay" box lists "Accommodation $ 599,00", "Restaurants $ 249,00" and "Attractions $ 879,00". They are not real prices. They are placeholder figures from the theme, in a European number format, on a Ghanaian government company's homepage. Google now shows "$ 879,00" in GACL's search snippet.
• Image descriptions read "Website -ads", which also appears in Google's snippet.
• A shopping cart showing "0" sits at the top of every page.
• The GACL logo appears four times in a row in the header.
• The forex link points to an unsecured http:// address.
• Two links to a car-rental company appear with no visible context.

Ghana's attractions as shop products

The tourism listings sit under addresses like /product/wa-nas-palace/, the URL pattern of an online shop. The Wa Na's Palace listing gets one line of description: a 19th-century palace with Sudanese and Moorish architecture, home of the Wa chief. There is nothing on opening hours, entry fees, directions, or the fact that Wa has its own airport. The photos date from 2018. So do the "related" listings, Gbelle Game Reserve, Rattray Park and Paga Crocodile Pond, all stamped 15 June 2018. The share buttons still offer Google+, which Google shut down in 2019. The restaurant guide is in the same state.

A link that leads somewhere it shouldn't

At the bottom of every GACL page, the words "All Rights Reserved" are a link to an outside domain. Click it and you don't reach a company website. You reach an open server folder, a raw list of files headed "Index of /", including an error log and a downloadable archive of a website. We have not opened those files, and we don't know who runs that domain or why it is linked from a state airport company. But a national airport operator should not be sending its visitors to an exposed file directory. Someone at GACL should remove that link and find out why it is there.

Not dead, just abandoned

To be fair, the site is not completely frozen. The news section has three items in 2026: an International Women's Day event in March, a statement on a petition about the Terminal 2 works in April, and the awards in September. Someone is posting. The site has also quietly dropped the old "Kotoka" name in its quick links in favour of "Accra International Airport". But three news items in ten months, on top of a structure untouched for years, is the classic pattern of a state website that was paid for once and then left alone.

It is the pattern documented in our "Launch and Abandon" white paper on African state tourism and heritage websites: money goes into the launch, nothing into the upkeep.

Why it matters

GACL is not a struggling agency. It is one of Ghana's profitable state enterprises: GH¢2.48 billion in income in 2025, a GH¢30 million dividend to government, and a new levy that adds US$100 to every international ticket, partly justified by the need to make Accra a world-class hub. A world-class hub starts with correct information. Keeping a website current costs a tiny fraction of one day's levy income. Travellers arriving for Ghana@70 in 2027 deserve a website from 2026, not from the pandemic.

Ghana Airports Company Limited is welcome to respond. We will publish any reply in full.

Current, independent information

• Accra International Airport: terminals, transport and tips
• All 29 airlines at Accra, checked in 2026
• Accra arrivals today
• GACL's US$30m profit and the cost of flying from Accra
• All airports of Ghana
• Launch and Abandon: the white paper

Checked and fact-checked: 7 November 2026. All observations from the public pages of gacl.com.gh as they appeared on that date. Financial figures from GACL's 2025 results and 11th AGM; passenger figures from GACL (February 2026); levy details from the Ministry of Transport. Text, research and screenshot by Remo Kurka for GhanaWeb-News.com.