The Hotel and Non-Hotel Association of Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro (Ashotel) values the “commitment” acquired this Monday by the Secretary of State for Transport, Isabel Pardo de Vera, before the Canary Islands Government, the Tenerife Council and the island’s economic agents to undertake the comprehensive reform of the Tenerife Sur airport.
The president of the hotel management, Jorge Marichal, considers “satisfactory” the commitment because the wording of “sufficiently specific and broad bases to have a good project and start of the works before the end of the DORA in 2026 “.
In addition, he stressed that the commitment of the Secretary of State is that “the amounts will be available as soon as possible.”
The meeting was attended by representatives of the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Chamber of Commerce, CEOE Tenerife, Asinca, Femete, Apeica, Fepeco, the Círculo de Empresarios del Sur de Tenerife (CEST) and the Foro de Amigos del Sur de Tenerife (FAST).
All these organizations, together with Ashotel, have been very active in recent years to claim a terminal that meets the real need for a first-class destination such as Tenerife, Ashotel points out in a note.
Marichal considers that now what is missing is to formally materialize the commitment in an official document “as soon as possible”, for which Pardo de Vera promised in a new upcoming executive meeting in Madrid, which will be attended by the president of the Tenerife Council Pedro Martín, who “has led” this demand from Tenerife society.
The need for a new passenger terminal in Tenerife South, according to the needs of the destination and its importance as an airport in the network, has long attracted the support of many economic, social and political agents on the island and the Canary Islands.
TERMINAL OUTSIDE
AENA itself recognized in an official document from 2002 that the Reina Sofía passenger terminal was out of date and in the “final stretch of its design capacity”, due to the increase in passengers in recent years and the “exhaustion of the project in the proper use of the facility “, as stated during the meeting by the president of FAST, José Fernando Cabrera.
Despite this, the DORA 2022-2026 recently approved by the Council of Ministers did not include the necessary items for the project that Tenerife really requires, but rather significantly lower amounts – specifically, slightly more than 3.4 million for the drafting of the project. -.
Tenerife Sur airport had a volume of 11.1 million passengers in 2019, which places it as the second airport in the Canary Islands, behind Gando, and seventh in the State.
In November 2018, AENA put out to tender the project for a new terminal for Tenerife Sur for a total amount of 62.4 million euros without previously making it known to public institutions, businessmen or civil society, a circumstance that Ashotel denounced before the public opinion and that revealed the “null sensitivity” of the public entity with the island.
