If you land at Miguel Hernández Alicante-Elche Airport at night, between Thursday and Sunday, you’ll most likely have to wait in line for a taxi. Especially in the summer. This has been confirmed to this newspaper by frequent users, Aena employees, and the two Elche taxi associations.
On one side are the customers. Some, this Thursday night, reported to INFORMACIÓN waiting times of up to half an hour to get a taxi. On the other side are the transport professionals, who assert that the problem “is no longer structural, as it was last year, as it occurred daily and almost all day long. The measures adopted have meant that queues no longer occur every day, but only at specific times,” says Javier López, president of Radio Taxi Elche.
The most common causes
When do problems most frequently occur? As we said. Heading into the weekend and at night, “when flight tickets are cheaper, there are more landings close together. Sometimes you see three or four airplane lights waiting their turn to land,” explains the Servitaxi Elche association. There are also occasional delays by airlines. “Because they are multimillion-dollar companies and the fines they pay for delays are ridiculous, accumulations at night are frequent,” they add. It’s also true that the facility has never received so much traffic in its history.
More licenses, but no connection to key points
The measures adopted by the General Directorate of Transport have offered a “significant” improvement, according to taxi drivers. In Elche, 24 new taxi licenses have been granted, in addition to ten new VTC licenses, and the frequency of buses from Alicante has also been increased. Problem? There are still not frequent connections, even less so at night, with key destinations like Torrevieja or Benidorm, according to Radio Taxi.
The president of this organization, which represents around 180 taxi drivers, assures that “this year there has been a significant improvement, and from our point of view, we have provided positive reports. It must be taken into account that sometimes the lines seem very long, but the wait time is between 5 and 10 minutes.”
The specific case of Thursday night
However, this was not the case on Thursday night. This newspaper has confirmed among several users that much longer waits occurred between 10 and 12 p.m., at least. Renowned economist Andrés Pedreño, former rector of the University of Alicante, had to wait in line for over half an hour. At 10:50 p.m., he posted a tweet that read: “Unpresentable: the airport without taxis. Line and a taxi arrived in 25 minutes.”
When contacted by Pedreño, the professor of Applied Economics expressed his personal discomfort but, above all, his reflection on what he found “incredible,” because, “from what I was able to gather from those present, lines are a recurring theme, and it’s incomprehensible that, on the one hand, there is pressure to build a second runway, and on the other, users have to wait more than half an hour for a taxi.”
The economist believes that “the main economic engine of the province should not be mistreated in this way, and this problem should be solved by increasing the number of licenses for Elche or opening the airport to all taxi drivers in the province. It’s a serious problem that primarily affects tourism.”
According to Pedreño, what happened Thursday night cannot be attributed to an accumulation of arrivals, since “the airport was very quiet, there were almost no passengers on the baggage claim belts. Only two planes had landed, ours from Oviedo and another.”
Is there a solution?
The solution to the problem? It seems complex. Taxi drivers claim that granting more licenses would not prevent delays from occurring at specific times, “as is happening now.” Their reports highlight that, for example, taxi drivers wait between 40 and 60 minutes from Monday to Friday. Aena, Elche City Council, and the Directorate General of Transport must continue working to improve coordination and, consequently, the taxi service.
Actions from the Generalitat
The Director General of Transport and Logistics of the Ministry of the Environment, Manuel Ríos Pérez, acknowledged to INFORMACIÓN this Friday that “specific data on waiting times exists, but as in other parts of Spain with a large influx of visitors, such as Madrid, where a month ago it took me almost an hour to board a taxi at Atocha Station.”
The regional government’s top official for transport policy understands that waiting times are negative for tourism, but also points out that, with the measures adopted, the problem has gone from being a recurring one last year to now occurring on a “one-off” basis. Specifically, the Generalitat Valenciana (Generalitat Valenciana) “has been monitoring incidents in the taxi service since May 2024,” he emphasizes. Ríos asserts that the problems occur mainly “after midnight, on flights arriving with unforeseen delays, which are not reported to the Elche City Council’s taxi services.” This newspaper also sought the opinion of the Elche City Council, but was unsuccessful.
Author: Derek Appleton
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