Aena will apply from March a reduction of 3.17% of the rates that charges airlines, following the National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) has given its approval to the price structure proposed by the airport manager and that airlines reject, seeking a bigger cut. This is how El Periódico de España collects it.
Aena, 51% controlled by the Spanish State through Enaire, may have a maximum adjusted income per passenger (IMAAJ) of 9.95 euros for each traveler. The fee reduction is applied linearly to each of the airport services for which airlines are charged (landing, transit services, meteorology, security, parking, passengers, passengers with reduced mobility, use of passengers, handling, catering and fuel management).
The airlines demanded an even greater cut. The international employers of IATA airlines and the low-cost giant Ryanair have initiated a conflict procedure once morest the modification of airport fees for 2022, as revealed by Aena, which confirms that the appeal does not paralyze the application of the new pricesand predicts that it will not bear fruit and the rates approved by Competition will not be reviewed.
Pandemic costs
The CNMC, the body in charge of supervising and controlling airport fees that are updated each year, already ruled in December that Aena might affect airlines through its fees health and operating costs assumed by the airport manager for the pandemicin total 140 million of euros. These are costs of 59 million in 2020 and another 81 million in the first nine months of 2021.
Given the lack of agreement between Aena and the airlines on the moment in which these costs had to be passed on to the operator’s rates, the CNMC has decided to include them in the calculation of the rate variation corresponding to the 2022 financial year.
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The Association of Air Lines (ALA), which brings together nearly 60 companies operating in Spain, considers that the 3.17% reduction in rates might be greater if the costs for the measures were not passed on to the airlines and Sanitary controls at airports due to covid-19.
“Transferring additional costs to a sector enormously affected by the health crisis does not contribute to its much-needed recovery, key to our country’s economy,” underlines Javier Gándara, president of ALA and general director of easyJet in Spain, who claims that the State assume all the costs that Aena may have incurred so that it is not transferred to the airlines and they do not pass them on to customers in the price of the tickets. “Being these controls carried out in airports In the face of covid-19, a matter of public health, we do not understand that the State disregards its responsibility to defray its costs and charges them to the airlines”.