The association 'Canarios sin Alas' has verified increases in the price of airline tickets of up to 60% on key dates and times for students and workers without the authorities doing "absolutely nothing to contain the cost".
This was stated by the vice president of the entity, Miguel Díaz, who explained that the increase in the discount to 75% "worsened the situation because it increased the price", adding that currently, after the restrictions on travel have been lifted, a new "considerable" increase is being registered.
In this sense, he commented that, in his personal case, bringing his underage daughter on a flight from Bilbao to Tenerife cost him about 360 euros, plus another 120 euros for the accompaniment services, while a flight to New York costs 242 euros. "This is unacceptable," he asserted.
"If prices are being monitored, it must be done with other prices, but not with those of transport between the Canary Islands and the Peninsula. Here there is no surveillance whatsoever and, if there is, they are simply watching how the cost rises and commenting on the play, but nothing more," Díaz lamented.
For the vice president, so far everything that has been done to try to reduce prices has led to an increase in them, recalling that airlines are companies, "not NGOs", that are built to make money, "so any tool that is given to the company that means they can earn a little more will be taken advantage of".
"It is what they did with the resident discount and it is what they will do if there is a reduction in VAT. If it is done, we will notice a slight reduction in the price but, little by little, they will go up so that in the end we end up paying the same and they earn a little more," he warned.
Díaz explained that although the price observatory has verified almost two years later that the price increase has been 22%, this data is "unreal", because they are taking rates from a Thursday in March at 03:00 hours with one or two stopovers, that is, "flights that are really very cheap but that nobody uses".
The representative of 'Canarios sin Alas' has emphasized that the reality of workers and students is that they can only travel on certain dates and at certain times. "If we only take those specific dates and those specific times, we have been able to verify an increase in the price of almost 60% compared to when the discount was at 50%," he stressed.
Therefore, he concluded that any measure that means that the airline can raise the price without the user with a discount noticing it, will mean an increase in the final price that users without a discount will pay.
