The eight airports of the Canary Islands, i.e. Tenerife South, Tenerife North, Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura, César Manrique-Lanzarote, La Gomera, El Hierro, and La Palma, have received the certification of the Airport Health Accreditation program from the Airports Council International (ACI), which assesses compliance with the sanitary measures recommended by the ACI, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), EASA, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization guidelines (WHO), which are in turn aligned with the objectives of the Operational Recovery Plan launched in Spanish Airports and Air Navigation (AENA) in April 2020, which is applying it to all airports in its network.
Airport Health Accreditation (AHA) demonstrates AENA's ongoing commitment to the measures adopted for the safety of passengers and employees as a result of the pandemic, with the aim of regaining the confidence of travellers by air.
Along with the Canary Islands, airports in Alicante, Bilbao, Ibiza, Menorca, Girona, Malaga, Seville and Valencia have also obtained accreditation, which are added to the Madrid, Barcelona, and Palma de Mallorca airports that had already obtained the certification at the beginning of the year. In total, 19 airports in Spain have obtained this accreditation, and the rest are in the process of being assessed.
As published by the ECDC in its Guidelines for Covid-19 testing and quarantine of air travellers, air transport has proven to be an environment with a low prevalence of the virus, accounting for less than 1% of the detected cases of coronavirus, and no increase in the transmission rate.
It should be noted that the protocols and measures are applied at all airports in the AENA network. Among these measures, ACI has certified the reinforcement of cleaning and disinfection in the facilities, the control of the maximum allowed capacity and the adaptation of the different operating processes to the new reality.
Likewise, the installation of protective screens has been assessed. Specifically, the Canaries airports have installed more than 500 screens and are distributed in different points of the terminals: at check-in counters, boarding gates, health controls, security filters and passenger information points; of informative signage through digital screens, posters and loudspeakers with messages for use of masks, personal distancing, hand hygiene, as well as marks and traces of social distancing and allocation of seating.
AENA has produced 84 new messages, which include all these variations in different languages, and more than 400 adaptations have been created for the different spaces of the infrastructures. In addition, around 400 hydro-alcoholic gel dispensers and other contactless elements such as taps (800 new units) have been installed at the Archipelago's airports.
AENA has worked on all these measures and continues to work constantly in all its airports to recover traffic safely. Its Operational Recovery Plan includes more than 100 measures, among those aimed directly at passenger safety.
