An article today in postal.pt questions what has gone wrong at Faro airport and who is responsible for the delays in completing the refurbishment that leaves tourists weaving their way through the mess as the peak season looms.
The ambitious and long overdue airport refit aims to cater for a maximum of 12 million passengers a year with the 2017 target of 8 million already well on the way to being met.
Commissioned by airports operator ANA which now is controlled by the Vinci Group based in France, the works originally were scheduled to end in March 2017 but are months away from completion.
The Minister of Infrastructure admitted while on a January visit to the Algarve that the March deadline was not achievable and offered a rather vague completion date of “June or July" as well as "before the summer."
The current ‘welcome to Portugal’ is one of chaos as workers try to complete their jobs in parallel with an airport flow system that needs to keep working.
Regional Tourism boss, Desidério Silva, says that despite the difficulties caused by the work, the redevelopment is absolutely necessary, a view echoed by Carlos Luís from the Algarve Tourism Association, Jorge Botelho, the president of the mayors’ group AMAL, and Elidérico ‘Eeyore’ Viegas, from the region’s hotels association.
Turismo de Portugal’s boss, Luís Araújo, stated in March that tourism sector income for Portugal is targeted to double over the next ten years. Araújo has already launched his Strategy 2027 and expects €26 billion in revenue in 2027 against €12.7 billion last year.
If this State target is to be reached with efficiency and comfort built into the allied infrastructure, either tourists will have to spend twice their current levels or Faro airport needs to cater for 16 million tourists a year by 2027, five million more than the planned capacity of 12 million when the new airport finally is opened this year.
Nobody of import is prepared to put on record why the work at the airport is so far behind and it is a shock to witness Vinci Group, an internationally renowned infrastructure specialist, unable to bring the job to a conclusion on time - this is meant to be what they are good at.
The seemingly endless dust, a chaotic check-in zone, passengers having to cross the length of the airport to over two floors from checking their bags in to arriving at passport control, a still cramped airside shopping area, an arrival area in a tent - these conditions and more have led regular users to despair that the job will ever get done.
Workers at the airport, persuaded to comment to postal.pt 'off-the-record,' said that "the people who go to the international side of the airport are aware of the scale of the work to be done and the state of total chaos the airport is in."
The car parking capacity seems also to be an afterthought for ANA as at current peak times there are insufficient spaces: as for joined-up, environmentally smart thinking, there still is no rail link planned so all arrivals come by car, taxi or coach.
This performance by a leading French specialist company is all the more unforgivable as there has been no credible explanation offered to the travelling public, the last announcement of a delay being made through an embarassed Minister back in January.
Faro airport, 1965
