Quote:
Originally Posted by gasman
But did YYC have to pay for the airport up front. From what I could glean they pay about $50MM annually in rent. If we assumed a 30 year amortization that would have about a present value of only $1.1B which is way less than cost to build an airport. Comparing to say Denver where the airport is owned by the county, it is not funded by tax revenues, it is financially self sufficient, so someone has to pay for that, the debt servicing in 2024 for DEN was about $600MM which is much more than the rent YYC pays (Albeit, DEN does easily twice the revenue as Calgary)
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Denver does 4x Calgary's passenger count annually. It's a bit unique in that it was built from scratch in 1995, which is obviously very new for a major world airport. Feds chipped in half a billion. The "someone" paying for DEN are passengers through PFC aka passenger facility charge, which was $10 USD if I remember correctly the last time I flew DEN-LAX, is quite a bit less than YYC's $35.
The other thing that happens at airports in the US is that the airlines pay for stuff. United spent $2.5B on Terminal B at Houston. American will dump $4B into a new terminal at Dallas. YYC's new terminal, whose primary user is WestJet, was about $2 billion. Who paid for it? YYC did, by assuming massive debt and charging you $35 per originating ticket. Canadian airlines pay 4x the fuel tax that US airlines do, double the landing fees, and double the taxes on a few other things.
At first glance it seems like the Canadian government wants you to stay home, but in fact they want you to fly because it's a goldmine of revenue for them. As I said earlier, if an airline charges how much the public
thinks domestic airfare should cost in Canada... they simply go bankrupt. There's a loooong list of dead Canadian airlines to prove it.
