Spanish company evaluates air traffic in the Dominican Republic
The Spanish company GPA has won a tender from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to evaluate and make proposals to improve the passenger air transport market in six Central American and Caribbean countries, including the Dominican Republic.
As reported by the regional government of Catalonia (northeast), this Catalan firm is set to analyze the competitiveness, regulatory quality, and operation of this sector in Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic, after achieving the tender for 235,000 dollars.
The CEO of the company, Jaume Adrover, explained that the six countries share “the feeling that they are losing opportunities in the passenger transport sector as an engine for tourism development, attracting foreign investment and generating more economic activity”.
The six, he added, “are small states in population but in a strategic geographic area, where the penetration of low-cost companies is generally small, and they need to stimulate growth by favoring competitiveness”.
Part of GPA’s task consists of designing a joint roadmap with integration measures for the different airspaces that will allow them to be more competitive, as well as analyzing the current regulatory barriers that make it difficult for new companies to enter.
Adrover pointed out that “a person, to fly from San Salvador to Managua pays about 600-800 dollars for a one-hour flight. This means that the prices for flying between these countries are similar to the cost of going to the United States ”, which in his opinion means that the markets do not facilitate the economic and social growth that is usually associated with aviation.
During the year and a half that the company’s work lasts, they should review the management of the airports and, if it is attractive for the companies, promote management that is as transparent as possible and ensure that the review bodies have the capacity to administer the sector.
GPA is a consultancy firm specialized in air transport, founded in 1999 in Barcelona and one of its growth paths is the search for international tenders.
To achieve this tender, GPA had the help of an agency of the Government of Catalonia specialized in advising on accessing tenders from multilateral organizations such as the IDB or the World Bank.