It is always good that there is more infrastructure in the country to support tourism and in that sense it must be recognized, but we cannot speak now of great benefits from what we are seeing”.
Francisco Madrid, director of Cicotur
There is no surprise, the opening of the Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA) will have a marginal effect in the short term due to the few routes and frequencies with which it starts, says the director of the Anáhuac Tourism Research and Competitiveness Center (Cicotur), Francisco Madrid , although it recognizes that in its surroundings there is a population density that, eventually, will generate greater activity.
“It is always good that there is more infrastructure in the country to support tourism and in that sense it must be recognized, but we cannot speak now of great benefits from what we are seeing,” he comments.
The next opening will have an impact on the infrastructure section of the World Economic Fund’s tourism competitiveness index (in 2019, in general, the first place of 140 countries was occupied by Spain, followed by France, and Mexico was in the 19th place ).
“For now, I repeat, the benefit is very marginal. In two or three years it is necessary to see the passenger traffic that is moving through there, but it is also necessary to consider how the airport system will work where the Toluca airport is located, which currently does not have relevant commercial activity. We will also have to see the reaction of the airlines due to the business sense they find”, adds the academic in an interview.
As a comparison of the start of AIFA, which will not be very different from the start of another airport, it mentions that, on its first day, according to public data, seven routes (14 frequencies) will be operated, while at the International Airport of the Mexico City (AICM) reach 600 every 24 hours (or more due to the growing night activity).
With what is known so far, what is your opinion of the travel experience that AIFA users will have?
I believe that in some services they will not be worse than in the AICM, although I have heard very good comments from people in the industry about the quality of the infrastructure, therefore, on that side we will see user satisfaction, but the big problem it is how to get there and the issue of interconnectivity with other destinations. In the AICM between 20 and 30% of the passengers is connection traffic and that will not change in the short term.
What do you think of the routes with which you start, to Cancun, Tijuana, Monterrey, Guadalajara…?
Actually, it is a logical decision that the airlines make of the routes where there is more traffic. Cancun is clear that there is a lot of traffic that allows more frequencies to be given to those of the AICM. Eventually we will see that for Easter it may have more operations to Cancun, but in any case it will be marginal. From Mexico City there are about 25 or 30 daily flights and if you add two or three it won’t make a difference.
Has the Cicotur done any projection of passengers on the AIFA?
No. We monitor the routes of airports that have 80,000 passengers annually.