A Word About Fees

Airport and air navigation charges do not ride the same roller coaster or show the same diversity as air fares. One of the core values of the CAA is customer benefit. As far as our pricing is concerned, this means that any productivity benefit from industry growth and reform is primarily passed on to airport customers. This usually happens in annual cycles, but in the review year, for example, thanks to the excellent end to the year, we were able to offer a significant reduction in landing fees for scheduled traffic during the Christmas period – for the benefit of the airlines.

On the other hand, the 100 % security checks of luggage at all airports, introduced at the beginning of the year, greatly added to CAA costs, forcing us to raise our fees by 1.4 euros per passenger. The average cost of 100 % checks and the price for each departing passenger is 3 euros. This too, is low by European standards. The EU is continually tightening its requirements, towards constant security inspections even for airport personnel, which in the small and familiar work community of Finland seems at first about as useful as buying an icebreaker for the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, the CAA follows all regulations literally when they come into force.

Airport charges (for runways, air navigation, terminals, security inspections) are the same “generic” fees for all customers, where only the packaging may lead to slight price variations. In future we may see increasing variations in fees for airport services, based on time and standard of service. In this spirit, the CAA opened its low-cost former freight terminal at Tampere in spring 2003 as an alternative to the higher specification main terminal. This alternative is widely, but mistakenly, regarded as being for a particular airline, but it is not. It is simply a cheaper style, available on the same terms to all airlines. This trend has been considered in the CAA’s overhauled strategy, which is “to provide profitable services designed to suit our customer segments.” Some seek quality, others low costs but everybody wants good and cheap.

However, we should remember that it is not possible to customize most airport and air navigation services for individual needs. For safety reasons, air navigation and manoeuvring area services have to be first class. For the same reason we can only permit a good basic structure for airports. Our industry does not allow poorly maintained, slippery or badly ploughed roads or tracks where speed limits are applied and drivers urged to proceed according to conditions.

This simple analogy explains why the sustainable reduction of airport and air navigation cost structures has to be carried out over the long term, through operational changes, not by pruning services to save money.