Aena goes retro to present its new airport investments in Spain

I was at Madrid's Fitur a few days ago. This is one of the largest tourism trade shows in the World and, as you might imagine, airlines and other aviation-related operators had a strong presence. Aena, the Spanish airport operator had a huge stand where it showcased their current and projected investments at some Spanish airports, such as Santiago de Compostela (SCQ) and Alicante (ALC). The new and projected terminals at these airports where presented with a miniature scale model, but what amazed me the most is the aircraft models they chose to fill them up...a joy for aviation history enthusiasts!...I do not believe we are going to see Lufthansa's Boeing 727 and TWA's Lockheed Superconstellation at Spanish airports anytime soon, though!


Is good old Connie making a comeback? ask Aena!


A nice retro aircraft model, a Lufthansa Boeing 727

When a direct flight is not really a direct flight?

I was recently at Barcelona airport and something caught my attention: in all airport screens, and also in the airport guide, I could see announced some flights operated by Iberia to destinations in North and South America (New York, Bogota, Mexico...), nothing unusual if I did not know that Iberia does not currently operate long distance flights at Barcelona (it is opening BCN-GRU and BCN-MIA in March). Passengers on these flights need to change planes at Madrid, however, nothing in the flight information suggested that was a non-direct flight.


Can you tell which of these flights are really direct?

Many airlines do code-sharing on certain routes, so you might end up flying with a different company to that you have booked the flight with, but I haven't come across (yet) a case where an airline markets a non-direct route, involving a stopover an a plane change, as a direct flight (if you do, please let me know!).

For example, in this snapshot from Aena's website (Spain's airport operator) you can find a Barcelona-New York (JFK) flight operated by Iberia, however when looking into the details this happens to be a non-direct flight.


Aena's website shows two Iberia flights BCN-JFK, the first one is a code-shared American Airlines direct flight, the second one does not really show a direct flight, but an indirect route to the Big Apple

It turns out that Iberia has been marketing for years something called "Catalunya-America": these are, basically, some flights specially timed to provide connections, via Madrid, to some American destinations. The way these flights are marketed has sometimes led people to believe those were really direct flights and it has been a source of misunderstandings.

From what I have seen so far on this case, I found the information provided by Iberia on these flights to be a bit misleading to the uninformed passenger. Despite the fact that they might be well coordinated to enable connections, these are still non-direct flights and this should be made more clear when marketing them.

What I am wondering is why Iberia can present these non-direct flights with their own codes as proper direct flight. What prevents Lufthansa, for example, from showing a Barcelona-Beijing or Barcelona-Bangkok flight, that would in all cases involve a Frankfurt or Munich stopover, as direct flights?

If someone could clarify these points I would be grateful...

By invitation: Roman from AirObserver on Airport privatization in Spain. What impact for Ryanair?

From today Roman from AirObserver is going to be guestblogging in this blog.
Roman runs AirObserver, a blog which covers airline news and especially European low cost market. He cooperate in Airpanorama project, a barometer which aims to offer the easiest way to compare most European low cost airline traffic figures.
He is also the author of an e-note about Ryanair business model.

Here is his first post in this space. Enjoy!

Airport privatization in Spain: What impact for Ryanair?


Picture: Barcelona airport new terminal

Spain's Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has recently declared that his government plans to privatize 49% of AENA, the public authority in charge of Spanish airports. This privatization will start with two major airports in Spain: El Prat and Bajajas (other airports will come). Thus, probably in the hope to reduce public expenditure and to a certain extent, to improve airports management. Indeed, Zapatero’s government, who leads a struggling Spanish economy, hopes that the privatization would generate €9 billion.

A private management could impact Ryanair’s revenues:

In Spain, as all over Europe, Ryanair is massively subsidised. What I noticed in France is that each airport which gives money to Ryanair is actually managed by regional public bodies. Most of regional airports that are giving money to Ryanair are loss-making airports. Indeed, Ryanair always deals in the same way no matter the country: it brings in passengers, in return of important subsidies and free or lower airport fees. Consequently, small airport have more costs than revenues. Moreover, most of the time, the airport also has to hire, train, and pay all the required ground personnel. If you take this into account, you’ll understand why it might not be that profitable. However, when they realise that they are no longer able to deal with these high costs, it is too late, as the Irish airline doesn’t allow for contract changes.

My point here is that this kind of deal is only possible thanks to public support. Without public support, the airport won’t be able to survive, and would not agree to such deal. A private airport will only focus on revenues. In the light of this, we can conclude that, if the Spanish government decides to extend the privatisation movement to other small regional airports, the type of deals that Ryanair was able to conclude until now won’t be possible any more. Newly privatized airports will look at revenues first and not hypothetical future tourism revenues.

Airlines such as Vueling and Spanair have already given their support to this privatization, however full details have not been disclosed yet. Cataluña government for instance is waiting more detailed precisions from the Spanish government and Zapatero's still has to find potential investors.

Thanks everyone!

When I started writing my previous post about social media use during the Spanish airport crisis, the events were still unfolding and I could not imagine this would be, by a large margin, the most popular story in this blog so far.

Every new crisis or unexpected event becomes a test-ground for social media and further proof of the growing importance of these new communication channels in crisis management. I imagine this is one of the reasons why so many people from around the World visited this blog and took an interest on how social media was put to use during this crisis of first magnitude. I was particularly delighted that one of the World's top airline marketing blogs, Simpliflying, re-published my article in its entirety, thus giving me the chance to make my analysis available to its well-qualified and global public.

Here is the link, and do not forget to visit the rest of the Simpliflying blog. It's totally worth it!

An analysis of Social Media during the recent Spanish air traffic controller's strike

At the time of writing these lines the effects of the Spanish air controllers unannounced and almost total strike are still being felt throughout the whole South-Western European airspace. This industrial action has forced the closure of the entire Spanish airspace and gravely affected that of the surrounding countries (Portugal, Morocco), the chaos at airports has been total, more so when the controllers' walk-away has coincided with the start of a five day holiday in Spain. The Spanish government has had to recur to extreme measures such as declaring the "state of alert" and putting the ATCs under military control.

It is not my intention here to delve into the causes of the crisis or on the chronology of the events , but to look at how the different actors of the crisis have been using social media to get their message through.

The role of social media during crisis has become more and more important and this crisis. I find that the current situation has many points in common with the recent volcanic-ash episode that forced the closure of practically all European airspace. As I explained in a previous post, the recent Social Media for Airlines conference, dissected the response of airlines and organisations to sudden short-term disruption of air traffic. In that case, the crisis was a catalyst that pushed organisations to embrace social media. And this case is no different...

In fact when the crisis started all the social media artillery seemed to be on the side of the air traffic controllers, that had their own blog and at least two Facebook fan pages presenting their point of view (this one seems to be the main one, but has much less activity than this other page that is focused on the current conflict...This put them automatically on the spotlight, with thousands of angry people directing their anger at these platforms. The Spanish ATC Twitter account was replying to comments and actively tweeting until Saturday morning when it seems that it stopped tweeting (the deluge of mostly negative comments was possibly too much for whomever was managing this account)

The government side did not have this sort of social media channels in place when the crisis started to unfold. Spain's airport and air traffic management organisation (Aena) had an institutional website that was in no way suited for this task, providing just some informative notes and a contact telephone. There was no Twitter account to speak of until Saturday mid-morning (more than twelve hours after the strike had started), when the official Aena Twitter account was opened. The first time I checked it out it had only two followers and they had not even had the time to upload an avatar picture for their Twitter profile. To their credit however, they got up to speed fairly quickly, I checked it again 15 minutes later and it had already over 1000 followers, by early afternoon they had reached 3000 and it was tweeting a constant flow of information on Spain's airport network situation. Besides English and Spanish it had also streams in the other official languages of Spain: Catalan, Basque and Galician. We hope that, as in the volcano crisis, this level of engagement with the public will remain going future.

It is unusual for events taking place in a mid-sized non-English speaking country with little Twitter penetration to make it to Twitter's global trending topics, but at some times today the Spanish airport chaos made it to the top of the list, for example: #controladores, #barajas,

Other hashtags you can monitor to follow the events are:
#aena #huelga #controladores #prat #estadodealarma #DGAC #Spanishstrike

most of the tweets related to these hashtags are in Spanish, but quite a few are in English too.

And obviously Eurocontrol, was also informing via Twitter, by the way, it must have been a complicated day for them since there were not only issues in Spain but also closures and disruption due to snow at Schiphol (AMS), Paris-Orly (ORY) and UK airports such as London-Gatwick (LGW).

Other unexpected side actors of this crisis have been Hotel Auditorium, a huge hotel next to Barajas airport with its own twitter account as it is in this hotel that air traffic controllers were holding a meeting on Friday night while the crisis was at its peak. They required police protection after the ATCs were discovered by a number of distressed passengers that had been hosted at the hotel after their flights got cancelled (as a side note, I also had the chance to stay at Hotel Auditorium earlier this year after my flight was cancelled due to an air traffic controller's strike in France).

I have also seen the potential of Twitter as a tool to arrange alternative travel plans, for example, I have spotted several people on Twitter looking for car-sharing arrangements to travel by road to their destinations as well as some online car-sharing companies, such as Comuto and Amovens, promoting their services.

And other online services that thrive with public attention in days like this are the air traffic live monitoring sites, such as FlightRadar24 or Radarvirtuel, that I already used, with spectacular results, during the volcanic-ash crisis.


Snapshot of Radarvirtuel around 7pm CET, air traffic returns slowly to Spanish skies, spot the empty region in Central Spain and around Madrid airport (MAD).

Some thoughts on the upcoming Spanish airports privatization

The Spanish government has announced that it is planning to sell part of the Spanish airports operator, AENA. This is a move that had been on the table for quite a while (with particularly strong pressure coming from Catalonia, where the current centralized airport management structure is widely perceived as detrimental to the development of Catalan airports) but the Spanish government had always resisted this move.

Even today's announcement was not very rich in details, it is not clear to me how this sale is going to be made: looks like AENA keeps all the airports but might allow other companies to manage some of them, namely Barcelona and Madrid, but it is not clear how, what level of implication will the private sector have given that the government will keep a majority? is there going to be a public offering? How this move is going to affect the way Spanish airports do route development?

Many questions to which we are will try to give an answer in upcoming posts...!

Barcelona airport (BCN) or how to cope with simultaneous demand and offer shocks

foto: Terminal 1 by Ricardo Bofill (from Creative Commons)

Barcelona airport got its new terminal last month, almost doubling its capacity overnight, this would be alright was it not for the simultaneous demand and offer shocks the airport is facing.

Although designed in times of double digit growth the new terminal opens when the airport is experiencing its first decrease in passenger numbers in a very long time (-15% in the first quarter of 2009 compared with the same period last year). Europe is in the midst of one of the worst economic crisis in living memory and this would be worrying enough for an airport that relies almost exclusively on short and medium haul traffic, but is even worse when considering that the Spanish economy is among the hardest hit by the crisis. Tourist numbers are plummeting and some airlines have been cutting services (Easyjet has reduced capacity, British Airways is axing its Gatwick services). Other factors are contributing to the fall in numbers, the new high speed train link between Barcelona and Madrid has taken half of the market of the densest and most profitable route from BCN.

The recent merger between Clickair and Vueling, with the resulting company controlled by Iberia, is expect to bring some rationalization on some routes where the two companies had overlapping services. In the long term this might result in a stronger company able to maintain its base at Barcelona (Mr.O'Leary would probably disagree...).

And talking about Ryanair, the offer glut has not prevented Ryanair from opening a new base at Reus (REU), about one hour drive south of the center of Barcelona, to add to its current base at Girona (GRO), about one hour north. It seems that Ryanair is doing well in Barcelona (surely helped by the popularity of the city among the European city-breakers and young travelers). there was even talk of Ryanair eyeing slots at BCN...we do not know whether has there been a firm offer but it seems that the company expected some concessions that Aena was not ready to grant.

There is certainly the concern in certain sectors of Barcelona business and political spheres about BCN becoming an almost exclusively low cost airport. Hence, the takeover of the the troubled airline Spanair, engineered by a Barcelona-based consortium with the support of Catalan institutions, with the objective of making it the "Barcelona airline" (Vueling might also have some claim to the title). The hope is that its membership of Star Alliance will help Barcelona to become an alternative Iberian hub (although smaller than Iberia and Oneworld's at MAD). A challenging task indeed!
The reality in the short term is that Spanair does not have any long range plane in its fleet, so the long haul hub might have to wait, however the recent success of some Star Alliance partners at BCN (like the Singapore Airlines connection) allow for some optimism. Maybe Spanair could be a regional distributor, in the South-West of Europe for its long-haul Star Alliance partners? or will it continue to be a feeder for Lufthansa (a sort of Air Dolomiti)? time will say...the truth is that if it is currently difficult for BCN to become a hub, it has never had it better, since it is the first time that BCN is the base of two airlines of a respectable size.

Therefore, and despite the crisis, I am bullish on the long run prospects of BCN. It is the gateway to a densely populated and relatively rich area, with a diversified economy and some of the top tourist destinations in Europe. The airport itself is very close to the urban center (although could be better connected by public transportation with its hinterland)and there might well be a latent under served demand for direct long haul travel that is currently flowing through other airports (mainly MAD).

The 747s of the image might never materialize (smaller planes like the 787 might stand a better chance at BCN) but as Ryanair has proven at Girona (from nearly 0 regular traffic to 5,5M passengers in just over 5 years) sometimes offer can create its own demand...