
The “Kalamata Airport Captain Vassilis Constantakopoulos” in Greece is meant to deal with additional travellers just after the pandemic. However, the dealing with services of the airport, operated by the state civil aviation authority YPA, are fairly modest.
Just before the get started of the Corona pandemic in 2019, the airport in the city of Kalamata, a port in the southwestern Peloponnese peninsula, was nonetheless rated in the center of Greece’s 38 industrial airports with 336,000 passengers.
To be ready for the travel growth Greece expects just after the pandemic ends, the airport would have to have to expend 60 to 80 million euros to grow the terminal and rehabilitate the runway, taxiways and apron, in accordance to a study by the Greek Ministry of Transport.
The revenue is to come from a private trader. Kalamata is one particular of 23 regional airports that the state wants to put into the palms of non-public operators. Greece has had a fantastic practical experience with airport privatizations in modern decades.
In 2017, the state awarded concessions for 14 regional airports to the Fraport airport group. The Germans will run the airports for 40 years. Fraport’s entry into Greece cost €1.24 billion and about the past four decades, it has invested €440 million in the design of new terminals and runways and the refurbishment of current amenities.
3 months in advance of program, Fraport concluded the modernization of the airports in February 2021. This suggests Greece will have a state-of-the-art airport infrastructure in time for the commence of the publish-pandemic era, from Thessaloniki in the north to well known islands these as Corfu, Mykonos, Santorini and Rhodes, and Chania on Crete in the south. Key Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called the new airports “bridges to a summer of greater independence” at the handover ceremony in Thessaloniki.
Fraport could spherical off its Greek portfolio with the imminent award of even further airport concessions. At the top of the privatization record is Kalamata. The invitation to tender is expected in the future handful of weeks.
The airport is not only the largest of the nonetheless condition-operated airports, it also has especially excellent growth prospects. This is thanks to the person whose identify it bears. Greek tycoon Vassilis Constantakopoulos, who died in 2011, still left his three sons the Nasdaq-detailed Costamare shipping business, not only the world’s 3rd-biggest non-public fleet of container ships, but also the 5-star Costa Navarino golf and seashore vacation resort in Greece.
The family members of the “container king” has so far invested all-around 1.2 billion euros in the lodge and villa elaborate on the coastline of Messinia, which opened in 2010. This has created the area, which until then was acknowledged largely for its Kalamata olives, 1 of the quickest-rising holiday centers in Greece.
The tourism increase is also mirrored in the passenger quantities at Kalamata Airport. They have quadrupled among 2010 and 2019. The authentic estate and lodge working company Temes S.A., managed by the Constantakopoulos spouse and children, is considered a doable contender for the concession of the airport, which is of specific great importance for the more growth of Costa Navarino.