Salvador Bahia Airport, Chief Commercial Officer, David Thompson at CAPA’s Latin America Aviation & LCCs 2022 summit

Transcript

David Thompson:So lots of things have been happening at Salvador Airport. So VINCI took over the concession in 2018, and for the first 2 years we spent quite a lot of money changing the airport, investing in new infrastructure. We built a brand new South Pier to allow us to increase the capacity. So what's the latest on the airport? capacity to 15 million passengers. Then we had this period of 2 years with the pandemic. Okay, it was a pretty challenging time, but we used that time to reorganize ourselves, refocus our efforts on especially our food and beverage and our retail shops. And now we're starting to see the fruits of that come through with a new lounge that's opening at Salvador for the first time ever, which will open in December. We have a new duty-free that's opening in October. We just reopened our duty-paid store. There are many dynamic things happening at the airport. What GOL realized during the pandemic is that Salvador is a perfect place to create a 3rd hub in Brazil. So after Brasília and Guarulhos, where we have 21 departures every day with GOL, they created this bespoke hub for Salvador to connect to the— I call it the Brazilian Golden Triangle: Rio, São Paulo, Brasília. And it's geographically— Salvador is perfectly placed to transport passengers from the northeast of Brazil to the southern parts. And with GOL and their partnership with Air Europa and other airlines that are operating like Aerolíneas, it creates this connectivity at the airport. International traffic's recovered to about 60% of 2019 level. So we have Air Europa coming back in December with 2 weekly. They'll be back to pre-pandemic levels by June of next year. So our European network will be back to pre-pandemic levels by next year. So we're extremely happy with that. We've got Aerolíneas adding a lot more capacity in December to Buenos Aires, and we still have to reconnect Salvador to other parts of South America like Santiago, like Montevideo. And then I think in the medium term that we should look at northern part of South America like Colombia, like Panama, to see how we can restart these services to improve our international footprint. Further afield, medium-term, long-term, we start— have to start dreaming about other international cities in Europe to connect Salvador, especially again with the Gold Hub. So it creates this perfect dynamic, the perfect environment for airlines to operate to Salvador. You know, the XLR coming in 2024, 2025, that's a fantastic opportunity for us. It's got a smaller business class cabin. Salvador is obviously a second-tier airport, and we can use this time to to build up this network with perhaps the likes of Iberia to create a route out of Spain from Madrid to Salvador and look in the longer term to make a widebody service with Iberia or another airline. And that— talking about Europe, but let's talk about North America. Okay. So today to get to North America, you have to travel via São Paulo, 2.5 hours down, 2 hours on the ground, and then travel up to North America and Partnerships that we can have with someone like American Airlines, which will get the A321XLR in 2024, 2025. That's a perfect aircraft for the Salvador route to Miami.

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