Planned departure Sole airline serving Bornholm considers breaking contract
AS IS THE case with most islands, there are two ways to get to and from Bornholm. The vast majority travel by sea: the ferry service transports some two million passengers annually, a service for which the current operator receives 4bn kroner (€540m) from the Danish state over the course of its 10-year contract. The locals complain a lot, but the operator turns a healthy profit.
Not so much luck on either count for DAT, the airline that offers the only other regularly scheduled way to get on or off the island. Its service, flying 200,000 passengers to and from Copenhagen each year, is neither subsidised nor profitable. Indeed, its current loss of 1.5m kroner per month had Jesper Rungholm, its managing director, earlier in the year publicly mulling whether to just stop serving the route from one day to the next, in breech of the airline’s contract with the local hospital to fly those patients who are too frail to take the ferry and the connecting coach service to Copenhagen for treatment.
Mr Rungholm immediately thought the better of doing so, telling the press the next day that his firm wasn’t the type to walk away from contracts. But his bellyaching served as a reminder that the route is not commercially viable, and that, unless someone in the government listens to his repeated requests to subsidise the route, his airline plans to stop serving Bornholm when the contact expires at the end of next November.
What Mr Rungholm would like the government to do is to declare the Bornholm-Copenhagen route a PSO (short for public-service obligation). To date, Copenhagen as been unwilling to do so, on the argument that it would break EU rules—and, anyway, it says, it already spends 25m kroner annually running Bornholm’s airport, despite it too losing money, and that this constitutes a form of subsidy, albeit indirect.
Other airlines, primarily SAS and Norwegian, do occasionally fly to Bornholm, but typically only during times when there are lots of passengers, which only makes it harder for DAT to turn a profit and riles Mr Rungholm further.
