Plenty of blame to share over airport summer queue chaos

DAA, the operator of Dublin Airport, correctly shipped plenty of criticism over the horrendous security queues that ensued early last summer after it let hundreds of its security staff take redundancy during the pandemic. But perhaps that isn’t the full story.

The company had been warning regulators and the Government for many months beforehand that its finances were so constrained that it could not guarantee its ability to adequately maintain security and cleaning services.

In an unusually blunt October 2021 letter to the Commission for Aviation Regulation, seen by The Irish Times, DAA quite clearly flags the risk that security queues could spiral out of control unless the company’s finances were bolstered.

The regulator’s role in all of this is that it sets the passenger charges that make up a large proportion of its revenue. It recently hiked the charges out to 2026, but to nowhere near the levels sought by the DAA.

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The boilerplate public and political viewpoint on such a standoff is that the DAA must be just another bloated State agency, and if it could only control its own gold-plated cost base it would be fine. However, if DAA was so bloated, how was it also so understaffed ahead of last summer? It’s difficult to be bloated and understaffed at the same time – they seem contradictory concepts.

Airlines fiercely lobby the Government and the regulator to keep down passenger charges. They say this helps to keep air fares competitive. But the truth is that recent huge rises in air fares have outstripped the impact of rising passenger charges many times over. When charges are kept low, it doesn’t necessarily mean lower fares. More often, it simply means bigger margins for airlines.

Ryanair, one of the most vociferous critics of rising airport charges, this week posted such strong quarterly figures that it has raised its full year profit guidance by up to €300 million. That ought to figure in the public debate next time it complains about the impact of passenger charges.