Recife airport loses money due to luggage failures

Unanimously, Anac (National Civil Aviation Agency) decided, on Tuesday (1st), to penalize the company Aena Brasil, manager of Recife Airport, for lack of quality in services provided at the city’s airport terminal.

The agency understood that there was a failure to comply with the level of quality required for services provided at the airport between August 2020 and July 2021. There is no further appeal.

Among the failures observed by Anac are problems in the systems for processing baggage at boarding and in the return of baggage when passengers disembark.

The punishment will be a reduction in the tariff adjustment to be calculated for the terminal, managed by Aena.

The measurements referring to the performance of the quality of service indicators in the period from August 2020 to July 2021 led Anac to impose a decrease of -0.5230% in the Q Factor, the index that defines bonuses or penalties on the tariff readjustment of airports.

Anac’s directors also pointed out that the level of service was below the minimum required after verification by the agency’s technicians and an external audit hired to measure the measurements.

Aena appealed the punishment, arguing that the Covid-19 pandemic significantly affected the contractual logic related to the quality of services, but the allegations were considered inconsistent by Anac technicians.

In a note this Friday, Aena states that “ANAC decided to postpone the realization of emergency works of all airports auctioned in the fifth concession round, including the six airports managed by Aena Brasil – the postponement was due to the fact that the management of the terminals started at the same time as the World Health Organization declared the new coronavirus pandemic”.

According to the company, with the pandemic, “several government decrees even prevented the operation of civil construction activities”.

“Thus, the improvement works were only carried out between March and May 2021. This period coincided exactly with the return of Anac’s evaluation, which carried out its measurements between January and July 2021. Anac had an impact on the perception of the quality of the service provided. The concessionaire understands that this evaluation should have been carried out after the conclusion of the improvement works, therefore, it appealed the decision”.

For the rapporteur of the case, director Tiago Sousa Pereira, the defense is not justified. In his vote, he states that the pandemic, in fact, gave more time for the concessionaire to “direct efforts and take the necessary actions to, as soon as possible, adapt the provision of services to the levels established in the concession contract”.

Aena has managed the Recife terminal since the beginning of 2020. The concessionaire won the auction for the Northeast Block, which includes the airports of Maceió, João Pessoa, Aracaju, Juazeiro do Norte and Campina Grande, in March 2019, for R$1 .9 billion.

Since 2021, the volume of complaints about airport services has intensified among users. One of the failures reported by frequenters of the terminal refers, for example, to the air conditioning.

For Anac director Ricardo Catanant, the penalty decided this week is a warning to Aena in view of the volume of complaints about Recife’s airport.

According to the legislation, Anac is responsible for regulating and inspecting the aeronautical and airport infrastructure, as well as granting or authorizing the operation of the airport infrastructure, and deciding, in a final administrative instance, the matters within its competence.

Regarding the decision that determined that the concessionaire’s ceiling rate to be charged by the airport will have a reduction of 0.5%, the concessionaire said that “it was a similar result to that of the other operators” in the first year of the concession.