Frances Leate
AIRPORTS in Spain will start charging a euro for passengers to use luggage trolleys, according to the Spanish Airport Authority, AENA.
The first airport to charge will be Madrid’s Barajas airport followed by Tenerife South, Alicante, Barcelona’s El Prat airport, Palma de Mallorca, Málaga and Gran Canaria – all the major flight destinations for Spain’s most popular holiday resort towns.
The State-run airline governing body, AENA, says this is part of a plan to claw back €3.2 million and clear huge debts.
AENA has defended the decision by saying Madrid’s airport’s luggage trolleys currently cost €3.7 million a year to maintain, but this will be reduced to €500,000 if they charge €1 per use – a saving of 3.2 million.
Other European airports have already implemented similar charges, including Germany’s Hahn, Munich, Cologne and Düsseldorf; Italy’s Milan, Genoa, Torino and Rome-Fiumicino, and Athens.
Airports in the UK, including Manchester, Bristol, Luton, Birmingham, Leeds and Cardiff all charge up to two pounds per time.
An exact timescale for the charges to be implemented has not yet been announced.
Given Spain is building thousands of kilometres of high speed rail links does it need so many airports these days. Air travel is becoming increasingly costly because of government taxes and company surcharges, perhaps it’s time to return to the age of rail.
The rail service is impressive, but the prices need to come way down. Whenever I’ve used the high-speed rail in Spain the trains have been mostly empty. Also, the ticket booking systems are attrocious. I travelled internationally earlier this year and the people at Malaga did not know how to book a train that physically left the country lol. After three hours of incompetancy I booked it online in 5 minutes via a website in the UK.
It seems rail expenditure has taken over from all other things in Spain and while that’s a good boast for Spain, to let everything else – like the inland road system – fall to bits in the meantime, is madness.
In these days of airlines persuading us to only have carry-on cases, with wheels on everything, this trolly scam seems doomed.