ARCHIVED - Murcian Minister says Corvera airport lacks critical mass to justify public transport

The Podemos deputy reminded him that many passengers are having to pay more for a taxi ride from the airport than they paid for a flight from the UK to Spain

Passengers continue to complain vociferously on social media about the lack of a public bus service.

The complete absence of any public transport from the regional airport of the Murcia region, located in the Corvera district of the Murcia municipality, has been the topic of constant complaint since the Covid pandemic disrupted the rhythm of flights to and from the installations.

Traffic plummeted during the pandemic, with essential services flights transferring to Alicante airport and at one point passenger traffic through the airport fell by 96 per cent from levels prior to the pandemic.

The number of passengers has been steadily increasing since international flights resumed, but the airport is still struggling to attract anything like the level of traffic enjoyed before the pandemic began.

During August the airport handled 66,369 passengers, but this is a fall of 53.1 per cent compared to the same month in 2019, but the total traffic year to date is still 82.6 per cent down on 2019 levels, with only 135,202 passengers having been processed in the first eight months of the year.

Alicante is performing slightly better, having managed 2,597,646 passengers year to date (74.7 per cent down), with 938,204 travellers using the airport during August (-44.6 per cent down compared to August 2019).

Nationally, traffic was down by 38.9 per cent compared to August 2019, so the fall in Murcia was higher than the national average.

The major problem faced by Murcia is the proximity of Alicante, which has considerably larger capacity, and several of the airlines have elected to use Alicante rather than Murcia this summer, hoping to fill flights by attracting passengers from the more concentrated catchment area of Alicante province, rather than the Murcia region, a logical decision given the fact that there are approximately 70,000 more British nationals living in Alicante province than there are in the Murcia region. Unfortunately for Murcia, popular routes have disappeared this summer (and frequencies dropped), leaving those wishing to travel to the region little choice other than to fly into Alicante.

The response has not been to find incentives to persuade the airlines to continue with their previous routes, but instead trying to minimise the dependence of the airport on passengers from the UK and open-up new destinations such as Morocco, as well as increasing internal domestic flights.

Although this has helped to boost the numbers a little, it does mean that the provision of public transport has been viewed as being of lesser importance, and as a result no subsidies have been given to support the public bus service which existed before the pandemic and took travellers directly to the coast, to bus stations from which they could link into other routes or directly to the golf urbanisations.

Corvera airport was effectively built in the middle of a field, and does not lie naturally on established bus service routes, so passengers this summer have had no choice other than to pay for a taxi or hire a car.
In summer 2021 car hire prices have been high and availability of vehicles low, so social media has been full of complaints about the price of taxi fares, high car hire costs and lack of public transport.

The point was even raised in the regional assembly last week, the Podemos deputy, Rafael Esteban, tabling a question about the subject, raising the paradox that in many cases passengers were being asked to pay more money for a taxi ride from the airport to their destination within the region than they had paid for a flight from the UK to Spain.

The response from regional development ( Fomento) minister, José Ramón Díez de Revenga, was that passenger numbers had not reached a sufficient “critical mass” to warrant the subsidy of a public bus service.

Sadly, the Minister has obviously never looked on expat social media to see the highly critical comments being made about the subject this year and the number of people opting either not to bother even trying to come to the region this summer due to the lack of flights and cost of both taxis and car hire or to go somewhere else altogether.

Image: Murcia Today ZC.