COVID-19: The impact of lockdown makes airport hospitality service providers urge for relief on heavy rents.

The airport hospitality service providers, who had to close down lounges after air traffic suspension, have urged airport operators to offer some relief on the heavy rents they pay for utilizing their facilities.

The lounge operators have requested the operators at some airports where they pay the minimum guarantee to reconsider the guarantees due to slow business well before the flight operations were finally shut down.

Hong Kong-based Plaza Premium Group and Bird Group and Travel Food Services (TFS) are the country’s major lounge operators which run about two dozen airport lounges together.

“Lounges are flight subsets. We had closed our international lounge facilities barred from the day outbound travel. Now that domestic flights are also grounded, we are going to shut lounge services until the situation is stabilized. It’s a tandem endeavour that we all must bring in to protect ourselves against the pandemic, said” Bird community executive director Gaurav Bhatia.

The group has lounges running at Trivandrum, Calicut, Pune, Dehradun and Bhubaneshwar. The other major player, Plaza Premium Group, which runs about 15 lounges at various airports, has suspended operations as well.

“All the lounges are partially suspended in view of the current Covid-19 condition and due to the recent government regulations. Yet our teams handle rebooking requests and cancellations with a complete refund,” said Plaza Premium general manager Bhavya Kukreja.

The adverse effect of the closure is also experienced by Travel Food Services (TFS), which runs 19 lounges around travel hubs like airports, railways and highways.

The uncertainty also creates anxiety among the hospitality service providers at the airport. “Originally, domestic lounges were operating but food supply was hampered as we weren’t sure how many passengers would be utilizing the facility. Currently, the lockdown has been declared by the government until April 14, we have closed the activities. Construction of new lounges has been halted at some airports,” said another lounge operator requesting anonymity.