Families Priced Out of Christmas Reunions
Every Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Three Kings’ Day brings the same anguish for Canary Islanders living on the Spanish mainland who have lost their right to the 75% resident discount on flight tickets. “Prices don’t drop below €400,” explains Tomás Hernández Lecuona, spokesperson for the ‘Canarios sin alas’ (Canarians Without Wings) platform, established eight years ago to demand solutions to exorbitant airline prices which skyrocket further on key dates.
Lecuona states the situation worsens for families with several members living outside the archipelago, for whom buying multiple tickets becomes unviable. “If we search for a family of four to travel to Tenerife on the afternoon of Wednesday 31st December and return on 7th January, it comes to around €1,600. We’re talking about unaffordable prices,” stresses Hernández, highlighting that some platform members have children who haven’t been able to see their grandparents for a long time.
Reduced Competition and Emergency Costs
This festive season, the situation is compounded by low-cost carrier Ryanair ceasing operations from several points in Spain, reducing supply. “This has made prices even higher this year,” he asserts. Furthermore, he points out that buying a ticket at short notice due to an unforeseen event, such as a family bereavement, can be extremely costly.
“Some people have paid up to €800 to attend a relative’s funeral, as was the case for one of our platform members, and many others have been unable to say goodbye to loved ones for financial reasons,” he adds. In his own case, with parents, siblings, and friends in Tenerife, he wants to maintain ties with his homeland. This year, to get home, he had to route via Seville and spend a few days there, but notes this is an isolated case as not all families can afford to play with dates or make such stopovers.
EU Blocks Public Service Obligation Solution
For eight years, the platform has been campaigning for solutions to these sky-high prices. One proposed measure, strongly pushed by the previous Canary Islands Government with Sebastián Franquis as Minister of Public Works and Transport (PSOE), was to establish routes under a Public Service Obligation (PSO).
In January 2023, the Spanish and Canarian governments agreed to experimentally designate one air route between the Peninsula and the Canaries as a PSO to control excessive price rises. However, as reported this summer by the newspaper La Provincia, the European Commission closed the door on this possibility. In a letter, the Commission’s Director-General for Mobility and Transport, Filip Cornelis, stated it “did not seem proportional to impose a maximum price limit in the form of a PSO on the routes in question,” citing aviation regulations that guarantee price freedom. He added that a PSO could be established if there was a market failure but believed this was not the case.
Campaigners Pin Hopes on Travel Vouchers
‘Canarios sin alas’ views this as a setback for one of the solutions presented to them. The platform remains optimistic, however, and is seeking other measures to alleviate the problem. Tomás Hernández emphasises that collective members are in continuous contact with representatives of the Canary Islands Government and parliamentarians from different parties.
“We remember that platform members are not technicians or politicians; we are people who suffer this situation,” he says, adding that they simply want some of the proposals made by different parties to be fulfilled. “Recently, for example, the option of a Canary State travel voucher has emerged. Afterwards, we have also been assured by President Fernando Clavijo, as well as by the Partido Popular and previously the Partido Socialista, of the possibility of subsidising Canarians with few economic resources, to give us a number of vouchers per year so we don’t completely lose our roots and contact with our families.”
“We hope all these proposals made to us stop being proposals and become reality. We understand it’s not easy, but we hope next year we can have some kind of advance,” he adds.
Reports Highlight Subsidy Inequality and Price Rises
The National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) warned in 2020 that after the resident discount increased, airlines had raised their prices. Furthermore, a report by the Independent Fiscal Responsibility Authority (AIReF) concluded that “the 20% of residents with the highest incomes concentrate 50% of the total subsidy on Peninsula-Canary routes.”
According to AIReF, the cost for non-residents increased by up to 14% on flights between the islands and the Peninsula, but most notably, this increase was greater on flights with a higher percentage of resident passengers, breaking the downward trend of the last ten years. Consequently, various proposals were made, such as increasing price sensitivity among resident passengers by showing the full ticket price alongside the discounted one, paying the aid retrospectively, establishing caps on the subsidisable amount, or limiting which parts of the ticket are subsidisable. AIReF also suggested “a more equal distribution of the subsidy according to income level for public aid to mobility in extra-Peninsular territories.”
Following these reports, some changes were introduced, such as obliging airlines to initially display the full ticket price and only apply the Canary or Balearic Islands resident discount afterwards. This year, the 75% resident discount has been mired in further controversy, with airlines claiming debts of €720 million are owed by the authorities. The Spanish government has insisted throughout that the discount is guaranteed.
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