AENA, the company that manages all of Spain’s airports, including those in the Canary Islands, have announced that they will continue to offer incentives to airlines with the highest occupancy rate of seats, between now and the end of March next year. This is something they have been doing during the summer to try to boost the percentage of seats filled on planes.
The incentive consists of reimbursing the airlines for the average fare that they charged, taking into account the number of seats occupied, and the different markets.
For example, AENA will pay half of the passenger fare for short-haul flights and connections with Latin America if the plane is 80% full, and 100% for long-haul flights with 70% of seats occupied.
The aim is to help to reactivate the Asian market and connections with the USA and the Middle East, as these have been growing more slowly than those with Europe, Africa, and Latin America.
Between July 2020, when mobility began to resume after lockdown, and August this year, AENA have paid out more than 100 million euros in incentives to airlines.
AENA says that airlines are offering more seats for this winter than they did at the same time of year in 2019, before the pandemic, which was a record year, and that in the first eight months of 2022, Spanish airports had recovered 85.3% of traffic compared with the same period of 2019, with a total of 159,308,824 passengers.
