Ibiza airport has now become a no-go area for private flyers. Sky Valet and AviaPartner have been granted a bi-poly operating franchise of the General Aviation terminal and are imposing prohibitive security screening charges of €60 per passage (crew and pax). So the combined in/out cost of a round trip is €120 per crew/pax.
I normally fly my C340 into Ibiza two or three times per year for family weekends, and its now become cost prohibitive. The airport clearly prefer users to spend their €120 on a Ryanair ticket. Surely a body of representation should come together from the GA community to protest against this situation in monopoly airports like Ibiza where there is no alternative. In my view protest needs to be addressed at a municipal and political level in Spain as well as in the European administration. I foresee this kind of situation arising in other airports through privatisation initiatives or for one reason or another. Cannes LFMD is not dissimilar with equally punitive charges now being made for mandatory handling on aircraft arriving from outside France. Id be pleased to hear from flyers who might be interested to make their voice heard.
As reported by Flyingwineman and myself (post 7) LEIB has indeed become prohibitive for most light GA. I sympathise with his appeal to join up and protest but, to be frank, in the case of Ibiza I think it’s a waste ot time. They make their money in summer on commercial traffic plus a load of private jets that basically fill up the parking area. The latter pay whatever they ask, so they may even double the prices this summer? Many are DJ’s flying in for the night making 100k or so? So please ‘don’t fill up precious ramp space and waste our time with your puddle jumpers, OK’?
Of course in winter the place is deserted, and any sensible business person would argue that this is a good opportunity to attract some business with reduced tariffs, but no, they are way too busy with counting the money they justed earned in summer and laughing their heads off to bother with that. Sad, but reality.
Nonetheless, if anything can be achieved, although unlikely in Spain, try AOPA.
Flyingwineman wrote:
Ibiza airport has now become a no-go area for private flyers
Where are the days when upon landing our Cessna a very nice young lady loaded myself and my wife into the crew bus and drove us to the terminal. For free…….
And I remember paying €7 at Biarritz LFBZ – after 3 days’ parking 
OK… €7 made no sense and such a heavy subsidy from the local chamber of commerce or whatever was destined to be terminated, and people would happily pay say €50 for landing+parking (the cost of a meal, down there, after all), but it is now well above that.
Or €10 at Granada…
Actually I reckon that a large part of the reason for the massive hikes has been exactly that: the ridiculously low fees in past years. These resulted in a kneejerk reaction which much of the time was in the form of a handover of the GA business to a handling shark.
Cannes LFMD is not dissimilar with equally punitive charges now being made for mandatory handling on aircraft arriving from outside France
Any details on this? LFMD used to be very reasonable until now – pity if that would change…
tschnell wrote:
Any details on this? LFMD used to be very reasonable until now – pity if that would change…
I landed at LFMD in a piston twin on the weekend. We were charged €140 for landing and parking. We didn’t get charged handling because the tower made a mistake and forgot to tell us it is now mandatory. We were informed that on our next trip we could expect the bill (for one night) to be closer to €300.
I was there just a couple of years ago in a single and paid no more than €30.
Blast. There goes Cannes.
Do I get it right, if you land from inside France no handling? What about departing direct from Cannes to outside France?
Not much left on the Cote d’ Azur now…. how much is Nice these days?
I paid €100 at Cannes LFMD in September 2017 (1400kg) of which about €60 was handling, which could (at the time, at least) be avoided by parking on grass, which I didn’t want to do (because I recalled it being of poor condition, from a previous visit) not realising that handling was the only option to avoid grass.
A part of the difficulty of this subject is that airports where there is a handler tend to set up a deliberately confusing scenario where inbounds who don’t know the local “ground” (which is most non-local visitors really) get trapped into handling. The first method is for the handler to “intercept” the inbound and the moment their car is next to your plane you are trapped. The “follow me” car is another method. Usually ATC is complicit in this because it makes their life easier. The airport admin, the same, for the same reason.. they also don’t want to deal with correspondence especially in foreign languages. So the inbounds who know how it works can usually avoid handling. This has all been written before but Method #1 is to “taxi to the aeroclub” – this will work only if the aeroclub is OK with it (you made previous contact, which nearly always requires the local language, or they don’t care who parks on their tarmac). The handlers are of course aware of these methods and try to block them. So for example for the fly-ins at Menorca and Astypalea we carefully pre-agreed NO handling. This was done by local pilots who spoke the local language – that is pretty well essential in Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and in comms with aeroclubs in just about all countries in Europe where you prob99 won’t get a reply if you try English. However a google translated email has a much better chance of success.
Avoiding handling, using these various methods, is the world’s second oldest profession The problem is that most pilots just file and fly and understandably don’t want to bother with this kind of subterfuge and hassle.
So you will often get one pilot reporting €100 and another (who knows how it works) reporting €30… And on one fly-in I remember one “local” who paid … €0 while the rest paid €20 … that airport was officially about €300
tschnell wrote:
Any details on this? LFMD used to be very reasonable until now – pity if that would change…
Quick tank stop somewhere and it doesn’t apply (enough places with cheap fuel and/or no landing fee)
Just have to park on grass (watch out for ant colonies, if you stay longer) – which a small piston twin will be expected to take anyway…
So if you roll up in a tank, which you park on grass, you don’t pay? 
Does this apply to all international flights (e.g. also from Germany) or just those requiring customs and/or border police? If the former, it is clearly against EU free market rules. Even the latter in my opinion is against EU internal market rules to differentiate the price in such a way.
