Sangster International Airport concession
The Government of Jamaica granted MBJ Airports Limited a 30-year build-operate-transfer concession for Sangster International Airport, financed from April 2003 for a US$135 million expansion sized for about 5 million passengers a year, and the airport, which served more than 3 million passengers in 2001, handled 5,105,420 passenger movements in 2024 and 4,495,210 in 2025 after Hurricane Melissa.
5,105,420 passenger movements, passenger movements at sangster international airport, 2024. 4,495,210 passenger movements, passenger movements at sangster international airport, year of hurricane melissa, 2025. Jamaica Civil Aviation Authority, Statistical Report October to December 2025, passenger movements at NMIA and SIA, retrieved 2026-10-17.
The move, and what it needed
The Government of Jamaica kept ownership of its main tourist airport and let a private consortium finance, expand and run it for 30 years, paid for partly by a passenger fee, so terminal capacity followed tourism growth without public borrowing.
Preconditions
- Steady tourism demand that makes a passenger fee bankable
- A development lender willing to finance the first phase
- A state able to write and supervise a long concession contract
Where else it has been used: Jamaica reused the model for Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston, under a 25-year concession signed in October 2018.
Limits: Passenger movements count arrivals, departures and transit passengers, so one traveller counts at least twice, and the figures sit in a table inside a PDF. Traffic measures tourism demand as much as the concession: the source cannot show what state operation would have carried. The concession terms, the US$135 million cost, the 5 million passenger design target and the 2001 baseline of more than 3 million passengers come from a different source, the IFC project disclosure for project 11353 (https://disclosures.ifc.org/project-detail/SPI/11353/sangster-international-airport-montego-bay), which records the financing plan as approved in 2002, not the final cost; JCAA publishes no open passenger series for the years between, so growth over the concession rests on two points from two publishers. The 2025 fall of 12 percent follows Hurricane Melissa in October 2025, which JCAA names as the cause of a 35 percent drop in fourth-quarter movements at the two airports; it is a storm effect, not a loss of the partnership. One airport is a single asset, although it carries most of Jamaica's international air passengers, and the concessionaire is a consortium of foreign airport and construction firms.