State airport operator Aena has awarded the drafting contract for the expansion project of Alicante-Elche Miguel Hernández airport to a joint venture comprising Sener Mobility, Cemosa, and Fairbanks Arquitectos. The contract has been finalised for 15,635,641.78 euro including tax, following a bidding process that originally began in January 2025 with an initial budget of over 24 million euro.
The selected companies have a global estimated timeframe of 60 months to develop the plans. The project will involve phased proposals to increase passenger handling capacity at the airport, which reached a record of nearly 20 million travellers in 2025.
The main plan involves constructing a new boarding pier on space freed up by demolishing the unused T-1 building and the smaller General Aviation terminal building. Designed as an extension of T-2 parallel to the runway, the new pier aims to boost overall airport capacity to at least 26 million passengers annually. It will include additional boarding gates equipped with jet bridges.
The future terminal extension will feature a centralised border control post specifically dedicated to managing passenger flows from non-Schengen countries, such as the United Kingdom, which accounts for the majority of traffic at the site. The area will also house a new commercial and restaurant zone, alongside a dedicated VIP lounge.
The wider expansion framework under DORA III for 2027 to 2031 envisions an overall estimated investment of 1,154 million euro. This will cover improvements to car parks, access roads, apron taxiways, and the creation of a rapid exit taxiway, increasing total terminal floor space by nearly 30 per cent. Parallelly, Aena is finalising a separate 38 million euro contract for technical management assistance to supervise project drafting and oversee early works.
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