Flying out of Lima's new airport? Leave an extra 45 minutes earlier
Peru seems poised to finally inaugurate a new $2 billion airport to serve its capital city on June 1, after blowing past three previous opening dates.
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But baffling transportation mishaps are pushing the airport's chief executive officer to issue a dire warning. Travellers: budget an additional 45 minutes to commute to the new terminal, even though it's located right next to the old infrastructure. That's on top of the usual hour it takes to get to the Jorge Chavez International Airport from Lima's main business district during rush hour.
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'Our recommendation is that passengers leave 45 minutes earlier than they usually did to get here,' Juan Jose Salmon, CEO of Lima Airport Partners (LAP), said in an interview. Passengers 'are going to face a new route and Lima's traffic in general is complex.'
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It was never the plan for Latin America's sixth busiest airport to become a symbol of poor urban planning. The result is the fallout of Peru's turbulent politics, having cycled through almost one transport minister per year so far this century. Still, the airport is expected to serve growing demand in Peru, one of the region's fastest growing economies.
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While LAP – whose majority owner is Fraport AG – has built the terminal, Peru's government had ambitious transportation plans to get passengers in and out of the new airport. The transport ministry planned a new subway, a highway and an eight-lane bridge over the Rimac River to get to it.
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Except it couldn't finish building any of them in time.
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The bridge is scheduled to be inaugurated in late 2028, while the rest of the highway will open a few months later. Until then, passengers will pass through prefabricated bridges that have less capacity than the original design, while forcing them to make hairpin turns through traffic-choked roads to get to them.
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The subway isn't finished either, but its woes are of a larger scale. It is being built to arrive to the old airport. By the time the subway is inaugurated, the old structure will no longer be there. The government first suggested building an extra subway station to get to the new airport, but has since said it will build an above-ground train instead, although plans are still in the preliminary stages.
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'The recommendation that LAP is making is important, and it's not necessarily about traffic,' Peru's Transport Minister Raul Perez-Reyes said in a press conference this week. 'About 85,000 people go into the airport every day and I can assure you that many of them don't know where the access route to the new airport is located.'
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He added that he hopes that travel times to the airport will come down to normal once the terminal has been in operation for several weeks.
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Salmon said LAP is not planning to file any lawsuits or arbitrations against Peru over the issues with the transportation to the new terminal. What remains unclear, however, is whether the government will impose fines on LAP, which as the concession holder will be inaugurating the airport around four months late.
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