Press Release

Supervisory Board resolves the Economic Plan for 2022 / Processes at BER improved

The meeting of the Supervisory Board last Friday was dominated by the current operative and financial topics facing the airport operating company. For example, the Supervisory Board was extensively informed about the difficulties experienced at the check-in and baggage recovery during the autumn vacation and of the operative preparations for the anticipated Christmas travel wave. The Company Management, in the context of the adoption of the Economic Plan 2022, also presented the current financial situation of FBB and the business developments anticipated for the coming year.

The Company Management reported to the Supervisory Board that one of the major reasons for the long waiting times, particularly on the first weekend of the autumn vacation, had been personnel bottlenecks at the service providers and process partners due to the pandemic. FBB thereupon successfully organised support at the critical points. Further measures have been taken, also with a view to the preparations for the Christmas travel wave, such as more seating in the waiting areas, cleaning intervals, orientation in the terminal, an even more tightly coordinated cooperation with all process partners in the terminal as well as – with a view to preparations for the winter – the resumption of operations at the 2nd take-off and landing runway.

Regarding the summer flight schedule 2022, the Company Management reported on the preparations for the start-up of operations at Terminal 2. The timetable until the end of March provides for training programmes for the employees of FBB, the authorities, airlines and service providers as well as a trial run. The Company Management also reported to the Supervisory Board on the status of the repairs of the travelators in Terminal 1. Beginning with the overhauling of the facilities in the main pier, said travelators are to be successively started up again from summer 2022 onwards.

In the context of the Economic Plan resolved by the Supervisory Board for the year 2022, the Company Management outlined the high degree of forecasting uncertainty with regard to developments connected with the pandemic and thus also the developments in traffic, which will continue to exist in the coming year. Following the expected almost 10 million passengers in this year, FBB is anticipating being able to welcome 17 million passengers at BER in the coming year. 

Aletta von Massenbach, Chairperson of the Company Management Board of Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH: “The Company Management presented to the Supervisory Board a detailed report about the difficulties experienced during the autumn vacation and presented those measures with the aid of which FBB will see to it that processes at BER will run more smoothly during the Christmas vacation and thereafter. We also made it clear that the structural personnel shortages at partners at the airport and the high extra expenditure for pandemic-related travel regulations in the various destination countries will continue to pose significant challenges to passenger processes at BER until well into the coming year. This will not prevent us, however, from continuing to improve said passenger processes in cooperation with our partners at BER. In our Economic Plan for 2022 we have demonstrated that we are expecting increasing passenger figures and, hand-in-hand with that, rising sales revenues in the coming year. I welcome the fact that the Supervisory Board shares our cautious optimism for 2022 and has adopted the Economic Plan.”

Jörg Simon, Chairperson of the Supervisory Board of Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH: “We have had concerned ourselves most intensively with the problems that arose at BER during the autumn vacation. The pictures of long passenger queues in the check-in hall and waiting passengers at the baggage carousels have revealed that cooperation between all partners at the airport is still not running smoothly and that BER is unable to reliably fulfil expectations, particularly at peak times. For this reason the Supervisory Board had continuously kept itself informed of the status of the measures taken and the effectiveness thereof during the critical period in the autumn vacation. The prevention of such disruptions to joint processes through an intensive exchange between all involved parties is something that FBB, in its responsibility for the overall process, will have to accept as its task to a still greater degree. Another of the major tasks of FBB must, also in 2022, be that of ensuring greater operative stability at BER."