Mexican airports are well positioned

Mexican airports are better positioned than European airports to face the adverse macroeconomic environment this year and 2023, according to an analysis by the English bank Barclays.

The financial institution stated that European airports will be affected by a drop in passenger traffic in the second half of the year and in 2023, as inflation and increases in interest rates will cause a drop in discretionary spending by consumers. .

In addition, they are more exposed to domestic traffic, which limits their ability to recover in a post-pandemic scenario where new risks may arise that increase restrictions on passenger traffic in the region.

On the other hand, Mexico has had a better recovery in passenger traffic thanks to the absence of travel restrictions that encourage international traffic, also having domestic traffic that has maintained its demand despite the pandemic.

According to company data, while Mexican airports have already recovered and even exceeded the passenger traffic they had before the pandemic, European airports continue to lag behind.

Fraport, which manages Frankfurt airport, transported 31.03 million people between January and August of this year, a figure that represents 65.36% of those it had in the same period of 2019, before the health crisis.

Zurich airport had 14.12 million passengers, 66.64% of those transported in 2019; Aéroports de Paris (ADP), which manages 14 terminals, accumulates 55.70 million passengers from January to August, which represents 76.03% of those it had in the same period three years ago.

For its part, AENA, which manages the main airports in Spain, has recovered 85.28% compared to pre-pandemic levels, with 159.31 million passengers from January to August 2022.

In Mexico, Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste (Asur), which operates the Cancun airport, already exceeded in 2022 (43.85 million) the number of passengers it transported in 2019 (37.86 million), as did Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico (GAP), that manages the Guadalajara terminal, which transported 20.83 million people in 2022 compared to 18.44 million in 2019.

Only Grupo Aeroportuario Centro Norte (OMA), which manages the Monterrey airport, still has a slight lag compared to pre-pandemic levels, as it transported 14.87 million passengers in 2022, while in 2019 it had 15.43 million.

termometro.economico@eleconomista.mx