Minister promotes airport investment

The Grantley Adams International Airport was heralded as an attractive investment prospect during a Local Investors Conference, which was held at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre yesterday.

Minister of Tourism and International Transport, Kerrie Symmonds, suggested the above as he led-off the conference by setting the context for the proposed Public-Private Partnership, which will eventually see the transfer of the daily operations of the airport moving from under the GAIA Inc. to a private operator, through a long-term contractual agreement.

The Minister stressed the need to find a suitably experienced and qualified private partner for the airport facility, and as such, the conference served as a means by which potential investors in Barbados could become more acquainted with the process.

The private operator is to be chosen through a competitive tendering process, which would ultimately be responsible for expanding and improving operations at the airport, to assist with driving increases in revenue and further enhancing the quality of service delivered there.

Speaking with the media during a break from the conference, Symmonds gave a few more details about the proposed arrangement.

“This deal has two key component parts. Over the life of the concession, which will be 30 years, there is an intention for there to be 130 million to 150 million US dollars being invested in the airport in terms of expansion and development over the period of that 30 years. For the first four years, however, there is a mandatory expenditure which cannot be compromised and that has been costed out to do a number of initial fundamentals and that is to be done within the first four years of the life of the investment, and that’s a 54 million US dollar commitment,” he explained.

“So whoever wins the concession will be expected to be able to finance that, and part and parcel of the way in which we determine the concession, is that those people who put in proposals have to be able to demonstrate that they have run an airport of this size, that they have been able to build capacity in that airport, that they have an ability to raise revenue of the type that we are trying to make sure is raised. So that we are looking at your experience, your capacity, your record of competence etc,” he added.

Thus far, Symmonds said, about fourteen or fifteen airport developers from around the world have keen interest.

“When I was in Ireland two weeks ago at the Global Airport Development Conference, that was the purpose of the visit, first of all to launch the process by way of notification, allow them to start to have verbal expressions of interest, because obviously people want to know more and more about it and in the space of the two days that I was there, I would have met with twelve. Subsequently, I am aware of two others,” the Minister indicated. (RSM)
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