Spain's national airport operator Aena is to continue offering incentives to airlines with the most seats filled this winter
The company said a similar measure which was applied this summer proved successful so it will be extended from the end of October to the last weekend in March 2023
The Spanish airport operator Aena is to continue offering incentives to airlines with the most occupied seats between the end of October and the last weekend in March 2023. This is something it has been doing in the summer to try to boost the percentage of seats filled on planes.
The incentive consists of reimbursing the airlines for the average fare, 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 operations 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 Middle East, as these have been growing more slowly than others such as the domestic market, Europe, Africa and Latin America.
Aena said that since July 2020, when mobility began to resume after the Covid-19 lockdown, and August this year, it had paid out more than 100 million euros in incentives to airlines.
A spokesperson for Aena said 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 this year Spanish airports had recovered 85.3% of traffic compared with the same period of 2019, with a total of 159,308,824 passengers.
