Why is it so expensive to travel within Bolivia and only with one airline?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The state-owned airline Boliviana de Aviación (BOA) is the leading airline in the country. It is joined by two other small private companies with very limited flights: Amaszonas and Ecojet. BOA reports directly to the Ministry of Public Works, Services, and Housing. The story consulted its website, and it offers only 17 destinations, of which only six are international and eleven are domestic. International flights go to the cities of Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Lima, Madrid, Miami, and São Paulo. The domestic flights go to the capital cities of each department.

Amaszonas offers six destinations. Two international: Asunción and Iquique. And four domestic: Cochabamba, La Paz, Santa Cruz, and Sucre.

The president of the Airline Association, Jorge Augusto Vargas, considers that there is no political will to allow private airlines to flourish and improve prices and flight offerings.

“Bolivia is restricting everything to private aviation companies. We are a Mediterranean country, and since we are landlocked, we should open the skies, but we do not open the market, the head, or anything. There has to be a real commercial aviation policy, not at the whim of certain state officials who do not listen to the private sector,” he says, criticizing the government administration of Luis Arce, who, according to him, has never allowed his institution to attend meetings on the management of BOA to find out what the real conditions of the company are.

Meanwhile, BOA is harshly criticized on its social networks: “a loss-making company, poorly managed, with lousy service, and subsidized with our taxes,” says July Val, a Facebook user. “In BOA is a problem of rescheduling with waits of up to five hours. It is a detriment very often, and not even the staff on-site knows how to give you an answer,” says Antonio Davila, another dissatisfied customer. Complaints of canceled flights, delayed flights, and aircraft with technical problems are also common at domestic airports. Another frequent criticism from users is that there are no direct flights between many departmental capitals. “To get from Santa Cruz to Trinidad takes all day; it is almost the same as going by bus. On top of that, they send you to Cochabamba as a stopover, make you get off the plane to get on the same plane, and wait a lot for a flight that should take only one hour,” says Vanessa Lopez, a frequent user of the airline, who misses the Amaszonas flights that two years ago made the direct leg.

Amaszonas and Ecojet are BOA’s private competitors, and both companies have seen their operations reduced as a good part of the routes they used to cover has been canceled. “In the case of Ecojet, the government blocked the company for more than three years and did not allow it to operate in the cities of the national backbone. They only gave it the marginal routes. Ecojet is a company that entered the market with four new aircraft, and due to the delays in permits and obstacles it had to face, it lost millions of dollars. We are practically living a monopoly of the market of a worn out and badly managed public airline,” explains Jorge Augusto Vargas, a lawyer specializing in aeronautical law with 40 years of experience.

BOA’s website offers flights to Uyuni, the world’s largest salt desert and the country’s star tourist destination. But when you search by dates, these flights are not easy to take since they are not direct: they always have stopovers in Cochabamba. Nor are they cheap flights, which impedes both domestic and foreign tourists.

A traveler normally arrives in Bolivia to visit two of the most popular destinations and therefore travels first to La Paz and then will look for a connection to Uyuni. However, Teresa Aguilar, a tourism agent in La Paz, says that foreigners are amazed at how expensive a flight can be for that leg. On BOA’s website, if you are looking to travel this month, flights cost around BOB 2,800 (US$400). On top of that, they are all with stopovers through Cochabamba and can take between 2 hours and 10 minutes to 11 hours in stopovers.

The cost of flying to Uyuni compares to taking an international flight; for example, a traveler could go to São Paulo or Miami for the same US$400, depending on the season.

For analyst Jorge Augusto Vargas, “a place like Uyuni is a world-class destination, and we do not take advantage of it; we should have daily and direct flights, but there is no private company that guarantees punctual and safe flights. At one time, three private companies were operating, making flights all the time, and there was a great flow of tourists.”

“We should have those low-cost airlines as they have in Europe,” says Fabrizio Perez, another BOA user who complains about the lack of connections to Rurrenabaque, a wonderful destination in the Bolivian Amazon that was number one in foreign visitors but is now in disuse because all flights to the area have been canceled for more than two years. Amaszonas and Ecojet used to cover those routes but have not yet been able to resume operations.

For several days Bloomberg Línea tried to contact officials from the Ministry of Public Works and Boa. There was no response by the time this edition went to press.

With information from Bloomberg Línea