CCOO maintains that the expansion plan for 12 airports included in the Airport Regulation Document 2027-2031 (DORA III) will increase the arrival of tourists to already collapsed enclaves, which, in their opinion, will result in a rise in the cost of access to housing and in greater polluting emissions.
The union estimates that, with these actions, recently endowed with an investment of 13,000 million euros, the aim is to reach 347 million passengers in 2031, that is, 22% more than in 2023, after passenger traffic has doubled between 1999 and 2019.
According to CCOO, the strong increases in international travelers have driven tourist overcrowding "in many destinations, especially islands, the Mediterranean coast and large cities," which has caused a "significant increase in housing prices, in the gentrification of urban areas and in territorial and environmental impacts."
For the trade union organization, "sustainable tourism and tourist overcrowding are incompatible concepts", since the benefits of this activity "are losing weight regarding their negative impacts, especially with regard to the effects on housing".
Despite this, CCOO defends that it is still "in time to reorder the model and the tourist offer" and to use the DORA III investment to address the sustainable renovation of infrastructures in airports with less traffic, "avoiding perpetuating historical imbalances that prevent social and territorial cohesion".
The union also "misses" that the five-year plan does not incorporate "a greater vision towards the human factor", that is, towards the professionalization and labor conditions of airport staff "as a backbone of the investment in improving airport infrastructure".
For these reasons, CCOO judges that the decision to expand airports contemplated in DORA III is of "great depth", since, in its view, it harms the objectives of emission reduction and decarbonization of the productive model and indirectly contributes to the already unbearable increase in housing prices in saturated tourist areas. Therefore, it demands that "it cannot be taken without a broad social and political debate that redefines the plan with the essential participation of social agents".