The Chamber of Commerce of Santa Cruz de Tenerife claims that Spanish Airports and Air Navigation (Aena) maintain with Canary Islands his “commitment to freeze airport charges until 2026.” The announced decision to increase them by 4.09% by 2024 shows “the need for the Canary Islands to be represented on the Board of Directors” of the entity.
The Chamber “strongly rejects” Aena’s decision to increase its rates. Its president, Santiago Sesé, considers that “the increase in the price of tickets derived from this increase occurs in a particularly critical context for the Canarian economy.” He values that “after having been able to recover from the damage caused by the pandemic” it will “foreseeably” face a “period of economic slowdown in which it will be necessary to use all available stimuli to avoid reversing the path traveled.
The sources highlight “the excellent results that the Canary Islands economy has achieved in a very long time, both in terms of economic growth and the creation of employment». Therefore, “This measure would mean a worsening of the foreseeable economic slowdown towards which all the studies point, which in the case of the Islands is greatly conditioned by the behavior of tourist activity,” says Sesé.
In this sense, “and bearing in mind that our region does not behave in the same way as the rest of the national territory”, the chamber president considers that “it would make sense for an exception to be made and the rate freeze to be maintained until 2026”. This, he adds, “is what was contemplated in DORA II and, now, the airport entity itself contradicts it.”
The Chamber of Commerce insists on “the increasingly pressing need” for the Canary Islands to have a presence on the Board of Directors of Aena, “a pending issue with consequences for our territory.”
