The Spanish company GPA has won a tender from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to evaluate the passenger air transport market in six Central American and Caribbean countries and make proposals to improve it.
As reported on Sunday by the Regional Government of Catalonia (Northeast), this Catalan company will analyze the competitiveness, quality of regulation and operation of this sector in Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, after winning the bid for $ 235,000, about 199,700 euros.
The company’s CEO, Jaume Adrover, explained that the six countries “share a feeling that they are losing opportunities in the passenger transport sector as a driver for tourism development, attracting foreign investment and generating more economic activity”.
The six, he added, “are small states in terms of population, but in a strategic geographic area, where penetration of low-cost businesses is generally low, and they need to stimulate growth for competitiveness.”
Part of GPA’s task will be to design a common roadmap of integration measures for the different airspaces that allow them to be more competitive, and analyze the current regulatory barriers that make it difficult for new companies to enter.
Adrover pointed out that “someone flying from San Salvador to Managua pays about $ 600-800 for a one-hour flight. This means that the prices for flying between these countries are comparable to the costs of getting to the United States, ”which he says means that the markets are not facilitating the economic and social growth usually associated with aviation.
For a year and a half of the company’s work, they must review the management of the airports and, if it is attractive to the companies, promote management as transparent as possible and ensure that the assessment bodies have the capacity to handle the sector.
GPA is a consultancy specializing in air transport, founded in 1999 in Barcelona and one of its growth paths is the search for international tenders.
To realize this tender, GPA had the assistance of an agency of the Government of Catalonia that specialized in advising on access to tenders from multilateral organizations such as the IDB or the World Bank.