When Easyjet stopped operating out of Granada Airport in 2020, we lost many flight connections, amongst them London, Berlin, Milan and Nantes.
Vueling later picked up some of the destinations such as London and Paris, but when Easyjet left, the airport lost a lot of passengers – in 2019 there had been 214,851.
In the meantime, the Provincial Board for Tourism has been doing the rounds with charter companies, trying to convince them to use Granada Airport for international flights. The trouble is that most of them are going through hard times and not willing to take risks.
However, Chairman José Entrena hasn’t given up and is pinning his hopes on what he calls the Asturias Solution and getting the Andalusian Government to play ball. You see, the provincial boards don’t have the clout individually but the Junta does to put out a public tender along the lines that Asturias did to increase the connections for its airport.
The Principado de Asturias nailed down, using public funds in 2022, seven international connections to Paris, Düsseldorf, Brussels, Rome, Amsterdam, Lisbon and Milan. This arrangement lasts until 2026.
If the Junta does decide to subsidise flight connections, not only to Granada but also other Andalusian airports, then Chairman Entrena hopes to entice back charter companies that used to operate out of Granada such as Ryanair in 2005 with a connection to London thanks to the provincial board paying subsidies to the airline. The deal was that for nine million the company would fly in 2.2m passengers between 2005 and 2010.
In 2010 public funding ran out for Ryanair and eventually they pulled out.
Editorial comment: The problem boils down to this: there is too little passenger traffic because they are too few flights and that there are too few flights because of a lack of passenger traffic. Flying from Málaga is cheaper with greater flight-destination offers. This vicious circle has to be broken by increasing the number of flights and destinations… and support from people like us who live in the province.
(News: Granada Airport, Granada, Andalucia)