EU Airports Increasingly Turn to Private Investment to Compete With Global Counterparts
Skift Take
The process of privatization in aviation, including that of airport infrastructure, has been a difficult one over the past two decades, but as it continues it promises to bring greater efficiencies and competitive advantages.
The Airports Council International Europe (ACI-Europe) has updated a 2010 report on the share of private ownership at EU’s airports revealing a dramatic rise in private investment over the past six years.
Today, 41% of European airports — 205 in all — have private shareholders, up from 22% in 2010.
It is a process of commercialisation which the airports association’s Director General, Oliver Jankovec, believes is essential to global competition, with benefits reaped by running airports as businesses rather than public infrastructure.
“This wider process of ‘commercialization’ of the European airport industry has had far reaching consequences—not least in the domain of airport competition,” says Jankovec. “Indeed, the process of change has if anything turned full circle.
