The requirement of more open skies agreements in areas such as Africa and Latin maereica was discussed at the annual congress of IATA in Rio.
Willie Walsh shared: Without question the development of an open aviation market in Europe has been very positive. It’s led to significant growth, better options for consumers, stronger competition and it’s given airlines the opportunity to serve markets that wouldn’t be available to them. And I think that’s been a hugely successful development for consumers and economies in Europe and I think there’s lots of lessons that can be learned from that particularly in Africa where I think the case for having an open skies environment in Africa is stronger than probably anywhere else in the world.
So my own personal view is that this is something that our industry benefits from. It’s something that consumers benefit from. It’s something that economies benefit from and my personal view is that it’s worked extremely well where markets have been opened up like that and I believe that there’s scope for even more to do that and what you’ve seen the development of LATAM, the development of IAG reflects opportunities that exist and I think it’s great that the industry is taking full advantage of these opportunities when they do exist.
Roberto Alvo shared: Just a comment on Latin America in particular because of your question. Actually in the last 20 or 30 years many of the countries in the region have opened up their skies and today there’s many bilateral open skies agreements, even though probably a unique skies would improve the situation a little bit more. If you ask me I think that we have much bigger fish to fry with respect to regulation and what’s going on. We have high levels of taxation. Fees are high. We don’t necessarily have the right infrastructure for operating in the growing environment we have in Latin America, it would be great to see that happen, but I think that there must be focus on more pressing, more important things that will actually benefit the industry and the people that live in this region faster.
