IN A COLUMN of another publication recently, the writer stressed a very pertinent question: How much of the enormous Government taxes tacked onto flight tickets actually go toward the maintenance of our airports?
In the case of our own Grantley Adams International Airport (GAIA), the taxpayer may never know the answer because even though the facility is wholly owned by Government, it feels no obligation to publish its annual audited accounts for public scrutiny.
A polite request made a few days ago for their latest fiscal statements met with a deafening no!
While it’s difficult to draw any direct similarity, I wonder if we the taxpayers had been able to view the accounts of another Government entity, the ill-fated Hotels & Resorts Ltd, in a timely manner, perhaps more pressure could have been brought to prevent the haemorrhage of hundreds of millions of dollars.
So trying to calculate any comparison between the amount of taxes paid by departing passengers and what proportion GAIA Inc. retains towards operational and capital costs is almost impossible.
I also posed two other questions to the airport public relations department and asked if direct air-to-cruise-ship and intransit passengers paid the same ticket taxes as other travellers, but sadly did not receive a response.
This lack of accountability and transparency does nothing to enhance the wider understanding of the industry and the various contributions made by the many component players.
I will, however, compliment GAIA Inc. on the statistics section of its website. Â
At a glance you can compare, on a monthly basis, the numbers of embarked and disembarked passengers, those intransit and transfers, together with cargo, number of aircraft movements and so on.
Especially interesting is comparing the airport disembarked figures with long-stay visitor-arrival figures on the Caribbeant Tourism Organization website.
Preliminary stay-over arrivals for July were 51 253, down 12 per cent from the same month in 2011, while the airport disembarked number was 84 734, a variance of 33 481 or over 65 per cent.
In August long-stay visitors numbered 43 191, which represented a decline of 13.6 per cent over 2011, but with 77 601 disembarked passengers, a differential of 34 410, or around 79 per cent more.
As transit and transfer movements are shown separately, I think the discrepancy in these figures have to be explained.
Are they residents returning home, people flying in for visas for the day and not occupying accommodation?
Clearly, it could make a massive difference with the sustainability of airlift.
The gaps get even bigger in the winter months.
As an example, in January there were 101 738 disembarked passengers yet only 52 619 long-stay visitors – nearly [twice as many as] long-stay visitors.
What also appears inequitable is that the same rationale for recovery of costs that is applied to the airport does not seem to apply to the seaport.
We are told the justification for massive hike in departure or services fees is to cover the true costs of GAIA Inc.
But if the BOLT-financed Sugar Point Cruise Terminal becomes a reality, will the repayments be totally funded by port fees and other charges directly related to servicing cruise ships?
So many questions, so few answers.
