Declining receipts and cost alarm: it’s the perfect storm for motorway catering

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Revenues down between 10-15% net of inflation, costs for skyrocketing concessions to which must be added the other expenses for public utility services charged to motorway catering companies. “Our sector is at the center of a perfect storm, with the risk of not surviving the next summer season” warns Cristian Biasoni, president of Aigrim, the association that brings together the most important chain restaurant companies operating in motorway service areas , at airports, railway stations, city centers and shopping malls sounding the alarm -. In the summer, consumer services across the network are at risk. The accounts of modern catering brands are also under pressure due to very high interest rates and the need to always have operational staff available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is the picture despite the fact that traffic on the network has returned to pre-pandemic levels . «It is necessary to promptly create the conditions to increase the volumes of a sector that employs over 25,000 people and which today is literally on the verge of collapse – remarked Biasoni -. First of all, it is necessary to intervene on the cost structure by parameterizing the duration of the concessions to investments, reducing and making totally variable the fees to be paid to the motorway concessionaires and shifting some costs to their responsibility, such as those of public utility services such as, for example , the management of the bathrooms and the night openings, currently no longer sustainable by the restaurant chains ». The provisions issued by the Transport Regulation Authority (Art) with resolution 1/2023 for the assignment of concessions for motorway catering are also worrying, if adopted, they would represent a fatal blow for a sector already strongly affected by the pandemic and today at the center of a deep crisis. Among other things, the new rules provide for the presence of at least two food operators per service area, the return of under-cabinet refreshment points managed by petrol stations and finally the introduction of a price control mechanism, which severely limits the freedom of enterprise of the operators, without taking into account the specific characteristics of the concession catering sector. “We believe that these provisions would produce irreparable repercussions on the motorway catering market and therefore, paradoxically, also on the same user that they claimed to protect,” says Biasoni. Thus Aigrim, which represents 12 of the large catering companies with over 3 billion in revenues, officially asked the Government to start a discussion to identify intervention measures capable of safeguarding a sector that represents one of the main calling cards for food and wine tourism in our country especially in the summer period.