ACI report points to a decade of spending by EU airports in their infrastructure and facilities
Earlier this summer, Airports Council International (ACI), the representative body for the majority of the world’s bigger airports, released a report entitled ‘Leveraging Airport Investment to drive the EU’s Aviation Strategy’.
Looking back at what it describes as ‘a decade of delivery for the top 21 airports in Europe’, it also seeks to offer a wide-ranging rebuttal of claims that these same gateways had hiked airport charges to fund that investment.
The report declares that the airports surveyed – 21 of Europe’s biggest air cargo gateways, including Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, London Gatwick and Heathrow, Madrid, Munich, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Stockholm Arlanda and Vienna – together invested more than US$53 billion over the 2005-2015 period. Such a massive spend allowed for significant increases in airport capacity and quality, ACI argues, and with only relatively modest increases in airline charges used to help finance the investment.
According to Olivier Jankovec, ACI Europe’s director general: “Europe’s major airports show that airport investment is not about building Taj Mahals. It is about boosting capacity, quality and ultimately air connectivity for Europe – which means a direct and very substantial contribution to economic growth and job creation.”
The $53 billion spent was invested in strategic infrastructure “without weighing on public finances,” he argues. ACI estimates that average charges on airlines increased by 25.4% over the decade in question (an average annual rise of 2.3%), much less than had been suggested. Moreover, they are “essentially driving the objectives of the EU Aviation Strategy”, which calls for improved air connectivity and enhanced competitiveness in the sector.
The massive investment programmes undertaken by the gateways covered in the report all helped to maintain expanding day-to-day operations, comply with ever more stringent regulatory requirements (due in large part to the increasing threat to security), add new capacity and increase service quality levels, the report outlines. Given Europe’s airport capacity crunch, such investment is vital, ACI argues.
Funding
EU states have increasingly relied in recent years on private airport operators managing and developing their gateways’ facilities. According to ACI, close to half of all EU airports now rely on private shareholders, up from a figure of 23% as recently as 2010. Furthermore, it observes that ongoing constraints on public finances are likely to lead to ever more reliance on private sector financing in the future, while EU state aid guidelines rule out public financing of airports with more than 5 million passengers per year other than on the grounds of the ‘Market Economy Operator Principle’ – namely, that there must be a realistic prospect of a reasonable return on any public investment into an airport. All of which means that EU policy pretty much requires large airports to be self-sustaining commercial businesses; thus, says ACI, it is inevitable that airline charges may have to reflect increased airport spending, and that it is not unreasonable for those that benefit from the investment (ie, airlines, and indirectly passengers) to contribute towards its funding.
