Spain’s airport operator Aena is facing simultaneous conflicts with airlines and commercial concessionaires even as it posts record profits, with several businesses now threatening criminal complaints against its board of directors.
The tensions came into sharp relief when Aena’s largest commercial tender in its history attracted zero bids. The contract, valued at more than 1 billion euros, was intended to award the operation of commercial and advertising spaces across Spain’s airport network for the coming years. Industry sources cited overly demanding financial conditions, a high initial investment requirement and a risk-sharing model that potential bidders were unwilling to accept.
A failed tender can be relaunched and redesigned. What specialist publications have highlighted is that this one arrives in the middle of a string of conflicts that are creating an unusual image for a company at one of the strongest financial periods in its history.
Ryanair standoff
The most visible conflict involves Ryanair. The Irish airline announced the withdrawal of three million seats in Spain from 2024 and has largely frozen its expansion plans in the country while increasing capacity in markets including Italy, Morocco and Albania. The company has said it wants to continue growing in Spain but has tied that to a revision of tariffs at several regional airports, where it argues there is sufficient room to attract more traffic.
The dispute carries longer-term significance. In coming years Ryanair is set to add hundreds of new aircraft and will need to decide where to deploy them. Spain will compete for that investment against other European and North African markets.
Pandemic rents
A more complex dispute is playing out inside the terminals themselves, far from runways and check-in desks. When the pandemic emptied Spanish airports of passengers in March 2020, shops, restaurants and other commercial operators continued to carry costs designed for a reality that had vanished overnight. Parliament responded by passing Law 13/2021, whose seventh final provision eliminated guaranteed minimum rents during the worst months of the health crisis and required subsequent payments to track actual passenger traffic levels.
Aena never accepted that arrangement and spent years pursuing litigation against its concessionaires, seeking to have courts refer the provision to Spain’s Constitutional Court. No court took that step.
The legal dispute appeared to stabilize until Spain’s Supreme Court ruled last year that the contracts at issue were administrative concessions, not civil leases, and therefore fell under a different jurisdiction. Aena interpreted that shift as reopening the door to claiming pandemic-era guaranteed minimum rents and began issuing new invoices to operators.
Affected companies reject that interpretation. They argue the Supreme Court changed only which court has competence over the contracts, not the substantive legal protection the 2021 law granted them. They also note that the same ruling Aena is now relying on states expressly that concessionaires remain covered by the mandatory and retroactive provisions of the seventh final provision.
Airfoods and the criminal threat
The most advanced case involves Airfoods, a Spanish small business that operates several restaurant outlets inside airports. Aena is claiming 7.4 million euros from the company for guaranteed minimum rents from the Covid years. Airfoods says those sums were extinguished by pandemic-era legislation and warns that the claim threatens the company’s viability and roughly 200 jobs.
The broader response now taking shape across the sector may prove more consequential. Several concessionaires are studying whether to file criminal complaints against Aena’s board of directors if the operator maintains its claims strategy. Each company has commissioned its own independent legal analysis and will decide separately how to proceed. The fact that criminal action is even being discussed marks a sharp deterioration in a relationship that until recently was playing out exclusively in administrative terms.
Record results, growing tensions
All of this is unfolding while Aena posts some of its strongest financial results on record, driven by the tourism boom and robust commercial activity. Commercial revenues, from shops, restaurants, advertising, rentals, parking and other non-aeronautical activities, account for roughly one-third of total turnover and more than 40 percent of operating earnings, a figure known as Ebitda. That means a growing share of Aena’s profitability depends directly on the companies it is now in dispute with.
