Although most of the country’s airports have recovered pre-pandemic passenger traffic, government-operated terminals cannot tell the same story. Only seven of the 19 airports operated by Aeropuertos y Servicios Auxiliares (ASA) have recovered , and despite the fact that the parastatal’s traffic has risen as a whole, the growth has not been generalized.
Between January and July of this year, ASA served a total of 2.1 million passengers, 10% more than in the same period of 2019. However, the growth –of 193,281 passengers– was mainly driven by a single airport: Puerto Escondido. , whose traffic rose 82% by registering 188,192 more passengers than in 2019.
In fact, the data indicates that the growth was concentrated in the airports with the highest volumes within the ASA portfolio. This is the case of the Puebla International Airport – the company’s largest terminal, which grew 4% in passengers – and the Chetumal Airport , the third in passengers and which grew 10% compared to 2019.
Behind this trend there is a problem of origin. Until 1998, all the airports in Mexico were under the operation of ASA, which managed 58 terminals, a portfolio that was reduced after the privatization of the 35 most profitable airports in the country with the creation of four airport groups: Asur (Grupo Aeroportuario del Southeast), OMA (Grupo Aeroportuario del Centro-Norte), GAP (Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico) and the International Airport of Mexico City (AICM) .
With this, ASA was left with the least attractive airports in terms of volume and profitability.
“They are deficit airports , they operate with losses from the beginning. They only have a subsidy in the Federal Expenditure Budget, a budget item that they grant year after year and that is not enough to invest in new equipment, facilities, etc., “explains Fernando Gómez Suárez, an air sector specialist.
Hence, the recovery of several terminals has been dropper, a trend that has been accentuated mainly in airports such as Poza Rica , which in the first seven months of the year maintained a loss of 93% of passengers in 2019. Other complexes such as Ixtepec (with a drop of 82% in the same period) and Ciudad Victoria (which operates at a third of 2019 levels) are in a similar situation.
Investments are one of the factors that usually affect the performance of airports, which coincides with the case of the Puerto Escondido International Airport, which had a budget of 196.2 million pesos for its modernization, the largest pool of resources compared to other complexes such as Puebla (with an investment of 84.9 million), Colima (81.8 million) and Campeche (135.5 million).
For Gómez Suárez, the low attractiveness of other airports is due to the decline of some industrial sectors –and, with it, of several business destinations–, coupled with the lack of investment and a promotion strategy.
“It’s a symbiosis. A strategy must be established between the destination or the airport and the airlines, work at the three levels of government so that they have the necessary mechanisms to stimulate that market , ”he concludes.
