A TOTAL of 35 million passengers on board 320,000 flights have passed through Larnaca and Paphos Airports over the last five years, Hermes Airports announced yesterday as it marked its first five years of operation.
“We feel happy but it’s not a day of celebration as we have a long road ahead of us,” said CEO of Hermes Airports Alfred van der Meer, who described Hermes as an “experiment that has worked for Cyprus”.
Hermes Airports is a consortium of nine international and local companies, with the airport constructed on a 25-year BOT (build, operate, transfer) system, which will end in 2031, when the airports are handed back to the government. “The new Larnaca and Paphos international airports are perhaps the best example Cyprus has of the value and benefits to be derived from public private partnerships,” said van der Meer.
He said Hermes has so far paid to the government €200 million in airport charges, adding that if predictions for tourists’ arrivals come true, then by 2031 airport charges to be paid to the government will reach €1.7 billion, or €42 million per month.
He stressed the importance of the airports in generating tourism for Cyprus, saying that they have “heralded a return to tourism growth” for the island. According to van der Meer, this has been achieved with the arrival of new airlines and the opening of new source markets such as Scandinavia, Russia and areas like the Middle East and central Europe.
“Traffic in 2010 increased by 3.2 per cent and has grown by over five per cent in the current year,” van der Meer said, adding that some weeks it is even an eight per cent increase.
To increase tourism traffic at Paphos airport, Hermes chairman Nicos Shacolas said that he has undertaken a commitment with one company for the transport of 500,000 tourists a year, for a period of five years, from airports that had no previous connections to the island.
Paphos airport has the ability to serve over 2.7 million passengers a year while Larnaca airport can serve over 7.5 million passengers a year.
“Cypriots feel proud of their airport and that makes me proud but they have also received international recognition,” said van der Meer. He also stated that over the last two years both airports have ranked among the top five airports in the world for customer satisfaction in Thomson’s quarterly survey of over 70 international airports.
Communication and Works Minister, Erato Kozakou-Marcoulli put the success of the airports down to the continued work, under the Communications Ministry, between a group of state officials in conjunction with other services, representatives of various agencies and Hermes employees.
