Strategic Aviation
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IATA boss says airport privatisation a failure - Australian Aviation
Speaking to the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) assembly of presidents in Taipei, de Juniac said airports “perform better in public hands”.
“That is the conclusion of three decades of largely disappointing experiences with airport privatisation,” he said in his speech on October 25.
“The primary focus of airports should be to support local and national prosperity as an economic catalyst,” de Juniac stated.
“But in private hands, shareholder returns take top priority. And we struggle with costs at privatized airports as far flung as Paris, Sydney and Santiago.”
“What we have seen is that regulating privatised airports is difficult, to be polite, and has been a failure, to be impolite,” de Juniac told reporters on the sidelines of the AAPA conference after his speech.
“We haven’t found any government or any country that has been able to regulate efficiently privatised airports. So we have seen in countries in which airports are privatised an increase in fares in airport charges, in whatever we pay to land and to park our aircraft. At the same time the airfares have decreased. The gap is significant.”
de Juniac noted those airports that regularly topped the list of the world’s best airports, citing Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, Seoul Inchon and Singapore Changi as examples, were all in government hands.
And the industry group representing the nation’s airport, the Australian Airports Association (AAA), has previously described the privatisation of airports as “successful and transformative”, noting the “billions of dollars of private investment that would have otherwise come from the pockets of taxpayers under a government ownership model”.
AAA chief executive Caroline Wilkie, writing in the August edition of Australian Aviation, said the privatisation of the nation’s airports that began with Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth two decades ago had “arguably been one of the most successful and transformative infrastructure privatisation processes this country has ever seen”.
“The ACCC estimates that over the past decade, these airports have collected $1.57 billion more in revenue from airlines than they would otherwise have collected if average prices were held constant in real terms,” ACCC chairman Rod Sims said.
“Despite these much higher revenues per passenger, ratings of service quality are not materially different from those seen a decade ago.”
