News: Norwich to introduce £3 development fee
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Flights > News > # 1220 (16/03/2007)
Norwich is the latest airport to force its passengers to pay towards new facilities.
Passengers will be charged a £3 Airport Development Fee (ADF) every time they fly out of Norwich from April 2. The airport said the ADF will be used to make improvements to the runway and to improve check-in areas, shops, parking and customer services. Newquay airport in Cornwall, and Knock and Kerry airports in Ireland operate similar schemes.
The charge will be payable at departure from special ticket machines. Tickets will cost £3 for adults and £1 for children aged between two and 15.
Norwich airport’s managing director, Richard Jenner, told the BBC: "This charge allows us to make a step change at Norwich in the provision of facilities for both airlines and passengers.
"Without this small charge made to every passenger it simply would not be possible for us to put this level of investment into the airport.”
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Comment:
Customers do not expect to be charged £3 at the checkout of their local supermarket in order to fund future store developments, so why should airports be any different?
Charging a £3 airport development fee through a series of vending machines has to be a surefire way of putting passengers off, and causing unnecessary aggravation.
It is a great shame that Norwich is trying to develop in this manner, considering that people should be encouraged to use this kind of local regional airport. Airport operator BAA have quite rightly already come under considerable criticism for their plans to increase passenger charges at their other London airports in order to cross-subsidise future development at Stansted, so why has Norwich airport decided to follow a similar disingenuous strategy?
Much of the problem here boils down to the way that airport development is financed, but any improvement in retail and parking facilities should be perfectly capable of paying for itself through the extra revenue that the development will bring in. Either they are commercially viable on their own merits, or they are not, but the travel industry needs to move away from this ridiculous system of hidden charges, especially those which are levied at the last minute in the airport terminal. To be completely blunt, this is the kind of charge we expect to pay when visiting the third world, but it is slowly creeping in on these shores.
Considering that the vast majority of scheduled flights from Norwich are to domestic destinations, passengers are already paying a disproportionately high level of taxes and airport charges as it stands, but this charge is particularly pernicious, as it has to be paid by passengers at the airport. Domestic services rely on having a significant proportion of business users, in order to be commercially viable, and this kind of tax is particularly cumbersome for businesses to have to administer.
