SPECIAL REPORT: EUROPE’S REGIONAL AIRPORTS
Challenging times ACI EUROPE’s director general, Olivier Jankovec, reflects on some of the key challenges faced by the industry and Europe’s regional airports as aviation recovers from the global pandemic.
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s a reader of Airport World, you will be no stranger to the magnitude of the challenge facing Europe’s airports as they seek to restart and build a viable path through to recovery. As an industry that lost over three billion passengers since the start of the pandemic, and counting, we are facing a considerable task. We start with the harsh fact that we are grappling with the crippling debt that the COVID-19 crisis has left us with. This is a legacy with a very long tail, with European airport revenues now estimated as insufficient to meet capital expenditure and capital costs until at least 2032. Then, despite the success of the EU Digital COVID Certificate, we also have the uncertainty of knee-jerk, uncoordinated actions from states and governments when it comes to travel restrictions, and the tendency for these restrictions to linger long after any real public health benefit may have been achieved – and this, despite the fact that the World Health Organization has unequivocally stated that travel restrictions are largely ineffective. The stumbling, stop-start nature of a 2021 ‘recovery’ owed everything to patchy and uncoordinated national regimes, and nothing to the growing appetite of the general public to finally get moving again. And this is before we get onto massive inequalities in the way European governments provided financial support to the aviation sector, and high investment costs relating to sustainability and decarbonisation. These are challenges which face all of Europe’s airports. But whilst they might be true for all, each individual airport will experience the impact of them in very different ways, for no two are exactly the same. And as time has passed since the COVID pandemic hit us, some divergences are becoming more marked.
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AIRPORT WORLD/ISSUE 1, 2022
Regional and smaller airports are simply not experiencing either the effects of the pandemic, nor the challenges ahead, in the same way as the larger hubs. Each time new data becomes available or fresh issues arise – and, in recent weeks, we have seen this in the 2021 passenger traffic data, our Airport Industry Connectivity Report, and in the growing, disturbing rhetoric around short-haul flights – these differences become more striking. The passenger traffic data for 2021 highlighted the uncoordinated and often disproportionate national responses in terms of the travel restrictions imposed as a result of the Delta and then Omicron variants. These restrictions ran alongside the increasing success of the EU Digital Covid Certificate which allowed for some freedom of movement inside the EU bloc, greater freedoms in those European countries outside the EU, and yet entrenched resistance to opening travel between EU countries and ‘third’ countries with the inevitable impact on long-haul travel. The result? Smaller regional airports have generally outperformed their larger counterparts and in particular major hubs in recovering part of their pre-pandemic passenger volumes. This reflected the fact that beyond the transatlantic market, many intercontinental markets remained de facto closed due to severe travel restrictions, with the recovery being largely driven by leisure and ‘Visiting Friends and Relatives’ travel on intra-European and domestic markets. Does this mean that the smaller and/or regional airports are in fact faring better? Not so. Balance this data against the public warning that ACI EUROPE issued six months into the pandemic, that almost 200 European airports could find themselves on the brink of bankruptcy, with little or no State Aid support.
