Acciona Airport Services Brand Guidelines: Spanish Handling Since 1994 & the Andes Deal

An infrastructure group that also turns aircraft around.

Acciona Airport Services is the airport-services subsidiary of Acciona, the Spanish infrastructure and energy group. Acciona itself dates from 1997, when, English Wikipedia says, the construction groups Entrecanales y Távora and Cubiertas y MZOV merged; the group is based in Alcobendas, in the Community of Madrid. Spanish Wikipedia, citing El País in 1997, says the Acciona name was taken from the former name of the interactive science museum in Alcobendas. A Spanish-language company release of October 2022 calls Acciona Airport Services the group’s “filial aeroportuaria,” its airport subsidiary.

The handling business is older than the merged group. Acciona’s own handling page says it began operations in Spain in 1994, and the company describes itself as independent both from the airports where it works and from the main airlines at them, which it presents as the reason it can tailor services to any carrier. Company releases from 2016 and 2017 name Palma de Mallorca, Barcelona and Gran Canaria among its Spanish airports and give a client list of more than 100 airlines.

Inside the group, a July 2017 release placed the handling business within Acciona’s Infrastructure division, under the “ACCIONA Service” banner, beside freight forwarding. The same group also builds airports: its airports page lists construction work at more than 40, including Terminal T4 at Madrid-Barajas and the new terminal at Rome’s Fiumicino.

Düsseldorf, Santiago and Santo Domingo.

Germany came next. In a release dated 17 May 2016, Acciona said six airlines, among them Singapore Airlines and LOT Polish Airlines, had chosen it for handling at Düsseldorf after the airport’s 2016 tender for a seven-year licence, with ramp services for LOT, Montenegro Airlines and Tailwind Airlines starting that March and work for TUIfly, Bulgaria Air and Singapore Airlines from 1 June; the same release said it held one of the two handling licences at Frankfurt. In February 2023 the company said it had won one of three Düsseldorf licences for a further seven years, to 2030, and a ramp contract for the Lufthansa Group, including Eurowings, covering more than 55,000 flights a year.

That German chapter has since changed hands. Airside International reported on 16 September 2025 that the DACH ground handler AAS Group had expanded through “the acquisition of Acciona in Düsseldorf,” alongside two other firms, and Acciona’s current handling page no longer lists Germany among its markets.

South America became the growth story. Acciona says it entered airport services in Chile in 2016, and in July 2017 it became exclusive ground-handling agent for the new low-cost airline JetSMART, starting at six airports including Santiago and Antofagasta; the release said JetSMART planned to grow to twelve Chilean airports in the following months. On 8 May 2018 it announced it had completed the purchase of Andes, the LATAM Group’s ramp-handling subsidiary at Santiago, founded in 1990, taking on a workforce of nearly 1,000 and a long-term ramp contract with LATAM; Acciona said Andes served nearly 45,000 flights a year for nine airlines and that the deal gave it more than 60 percent of the Santiago ramp market.

In October 2022 Acciona Airport Services signed with the Dominican airline Arajet for passenger handling and operations at Las Américas International Airport in Santo Domingo, its first work in that country, starting with the airline’s more than 90 weekly flights to 22 destinations. The release then counted more than 3,000 employees and 22 airports, and named ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISAGO among its certifications.

How handlers present themselves.

Ground handling and airport-service firms work out of sight of most travellers, on aprons, in cargo sheds and behind check-in desks, so their public identity is built mostly from their own websites, press releases and careers pages. The companies in this guide load and unload aircraft, check in passengers, move baggage, build and break down cargo pallets and, in some cases, fuel aircraft, usually under contract to airlines rather than in their own name.

Photography does much of the work. Handlers publish pictures of ramp and terminal staff in branded uniforms and high-visibility vests, of tugs, belt loaders and pushback tractors in company colours, and of warehouses lined with pallets. Where a handler runs lounges or premium passenger services, those pages show the brand in front of travellers rather than airlines.

The second staple is the network. Station maps, airport counts, staff numbers and annual figures for flights, passengers or tonnes appear on almost every corporate site, and they change often as contracts are won, lost or bought. Service lists follow a common pattern, split into ramp, passenger, cargo, mail and fuelling work, though each company names and groups them in its own way, and the counts in this guide are given as each company or a dated source states them.

Recruitment is the third. Ground handling depends on large shift-based workforces, and careers pages, training academies and values statements sit prominently on these sites. Ownership is often a story of acquisitions, airline spin-offs and investment funds, so the guides that follow give dates and sources for who owns each company.

Four countries, one service list.

Today Acciona describes its handling unit as one of the main independent handling operators in Spain, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Peru. Its handling page lists passenger handling, operations, ramp and freight services, and says a digital platform now plans staff and equipment from real-time operational data, client requirements and historical records. The wider airports page adds cleaning, maintenance and assistance for passengers with reduced mobility, and gives a figure of 21 airports and about 130,000 stopovers a year; that page still names Germany, so the handling page and dated releases are the firmer guide to the current footprint. The counts have moved with the contracts: the October 2022 release gave 22 airports in Spain, Chile and Germany, while the February 2023 release gave 23 airports across Germany, Spain, Chile and the Dominican Republic and described the company as having almost 30 years in the sector.

The identity is the parent’s. The unit trades under the Acciona name, presented in capitals as ACCIONA on the group’s own pages, and its services sit inside the group website rather than on a separate brand site: the old acciona-airportservices.com address now forwards to Acciona’s airports page. Its releases speak in the group’s voice, with contract news, airport counts and named certifications, and they present the handling unit as one part of Acciona’s transport and infrastructure business rather than as a separate brand with a mark of its own.

For a design guide, Acciona Airport Services shows how a ground handler can live inside a diversified group’s identity, borrowing the parent’s name and tone rather than building its own; compare Groundforce, the Spanish handler of the Globalia group, and Swissport, which began as Swissair’s ground-services arm. For this guide we use brick red, sand and apron slate with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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