Expansion of Latin America’s airport revised on travel slump

Bloomberg

Colombia is scaling back a planned $2.5 billion expansion of one of Latin America’s busiest airports after the Covid-19 pandemic caused a collapse in air travel.
Bogota’s El Dorado airport, the country’s biggest, was set for an upgrade to more than double capacity to about 80 million passengers a year by 2050, from the roughly 35 million it saw last year. The outbreak of the pandemic will force the government to recalculate the plan, however, said Manuel Felipe Gutierrez, president of ANI, Colombia’s Infrastructure Agency.
“The dynamics of the airline sector have changed and as a consequence, traffic projections change,” he said in a phone interview. He did not specify how much the project would be cut.
The global air travel collapse has hit Latin America especially hard as governments
enacted bans and anxious customers stayed home. The crisis, which has already forced three of the region’s largest carriers — Latam Airlines Group SA, Avianca Holdings SA, and Grupo Aeromexico SAB — into bankruptcy, is likely to affect airports for years.
Fitch Ratings in April forecast a 48% decline in traffic this year for El Dorado’s operator, Sociedad Concesionaria Operadora Aeroportuaria Internacional SA, known as Opain, a division of Grupo Argos. Traffic is not expected to fully recover until after 2021, the ratings agency said.
El Dorado, the busiest cargo airport in Latin America and the region’s third busiest for passengers, was previously expected to see growth of at least 3.5% per year for domestic passengers and 3.9% for international through 2027, Fitch said in a report last year.
Opain didn’t reply to messages seeking comment.