The Spanish company GPA has won a tender from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to evaluate and make proposals to improve the air passenger market in six countries in Central America and the Caribbean.
As reported this Sunday by the regional government of Catalonia (northeast), this Catalan company will analyze the competitiveness, the quality of regulation and the functioning of this sector in Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, after winning the tender for 235,000 dollars, about 199,700 euros.
The company’s CEO, Jaume Adrover, explained that the six countries share “the feeling that they are losing opportunities in the passenger transport sector as an engine for tourism development, attracting foreign investment and generating more economic activity.”
The six, he added, “are small states in population, but in a strategic geographical area, where the penetration of low-cost companies is generally low and must stimulate growth by promoting competitiveness.”
Part of the GPA’s task will be to design a common roadmap with integration measures for the various airspace that will allow them to be more competitive, as well as to analyze current regulatory barriers that make it difficult for new companies to enter.
Adrover pointed out that “a person flying from San Salvador to Managua pays about $ 600-800 for an hour-long flight. This means that the prices for the flight between these countries are similar to the cost of going to the United States “, which, in his opinion, means that the markets do not facilitate the economic and social growth that is usually associated with aviation.
During the year and a half of the company’s operation, they should review airport management and, if attractive to companies, promote management as transparent as possible and ensure that control bodies have the capacity to manage the sector.
GPA is an air transport consulting firm, founded in 1999 in Barcelona and one of its growth paths is the search for international offers.
To carry out this tender, GPA had the help of a Catalan Government agency specializing in advising on accessing bids from multilateral organizations such as the IDB or the World Bank.