When it came to somehow putting the year 2022 into words, the Fraport board members saved themselves flowery descriptions. “Operational, qualitative: sentence with X,” says Stefan Schulte, CEO of the Frankfurt airport operator. And why did the ground handling services write losses despite the explosive return in demand? CFO Matthias Zieschang didn’t waste much time researching the causes: “Would have, would have, bicycle chain.”
Sure, 2022 was the year in which the number of passengers increased by 97 percent after Corona. But it was also marked by the summer chaos that hit millions of travellers: delays, canceled flights, lost suitcases, absurdly long queues winding through the terminal. But Schulte promised at his company’s annual press conference that not everything would be perfect in 2023, but a lot would be better.
The Easter holidays are just around the corner, the summer holidays are not far away either and the trauma of the past year is still having an effect: “It must not happen again under any circumstances,” says Schulte, who because of the conditions and also years before with his main customer Lufthansa in the Permanent clinch lies. For years, Lufthansa has accused Fraport of neglecting the quality at the location while at the same time being extremely expensive. Most of the newly ordered long-haul aircraft will be stationed in Munich.
Liquids and laptops can remain in hand luggage
Fraport sees itself better prepared now. At the beginning of the year, the company took over responsibility for the security checks from the federal government. The first seven so-called CT scanners will be used in Area A of Terminal 1, where most Lufthansa flights depart. Passengers can leave their laptops and liquids in their luggage. After 25 more such devices are ordered. Therefore, there will soon be “very often no more waiting times at all,” but of course there will be at peak times. It is still “extremely difficult” to find enough new employees.
As far as the tense relationship with Lufthansa is concerned, Schulte dismisses it: “We are much better at coordinating with Lufthansa than before Corona.” The relationship is “good, constructive, very intense.”
Fraport itself is doing much better economically. Sales increased by 49 percent to 3.2 billion euros in 2022, and profit was 166 million euros. It would have been twice as high if Fraport had not completely written off a shareholder loan for St. Petersburg Airport in Russia due to sanctions. But structurally there are a few problems: in 2022 Frankfurt was only 69 percent of the traffic level of 2019, the competition in Paris and London-Heathrow was 76 percent and Madrid was even 82 percent. Fraport wants to reach 88 percent in the summer of 2023. But the airport, like all other airports in this country, suffers from the fact that the low-cost airlines are flying in an increasingly wide circle around Germany: too expensive, too heavily regulated. Even the inner-German traffic “will not come back in full,” said Schulte.