Voa Brasil will be aimed at retirees and Prouni students

Retirees from the National Social Security Institute (INSS) and scholarship holders from the University for All Program (Prouni) will be the first segments to benefit from the Voa Brasil program, which will guarantee air tickets for R$200 each way. Planned since the middle of last year, until then without an announced target audience, the program has not yet come to fruition. According to the Minister of Ports and Airports, Sílvio Costa Filho, the initiative will finally be launched by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by the beginning of next month.

“We hope that the president will be able to announce, now at the end of January, at the beginning of February at the latest, a R$200 ticket program, which will be for two specific audiences at first, the INSS retirees public, who it reaches around 20 million Brazilians, and also for Prouni students, which reaches 600 thousand students”, he announced in an interview with journalists, this Tuesday (9), at Palácio do Planalto, after meeting with the president.

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In a post on social media, Lula wrote about the meeting. “I met today with the Minister of Ports and Airports, Silvio Costa Filho, and the president of Sebrae, Décio Lima. We talked about the Voa Brasil program, to offer lower priced tickets for retirees and prounists, the plans for the construction of the tunnel between Santos and Guarujá and the efforts to reactivate the Port of Itajaí, in Santa Catarina, stopped due to incompetence with deadlines of the previous government. We started the year working to make progress across the country,” said the president.

According to the minister, in addition to low-income Prouni students, INSS retirees who will be entitled to a cheaper ticket are those who earn up to two minimum wages. On the day the program launches, the government must inform the number of tickets to be made available. Silvio Costa Filho's forecast is that 2.5 million to 3 million people who have never traveled by plane or have not traveled for more than 12 months will be able to purchase air tickets through the program, expanding the democratization of access to air transport in the country.

“This is the first stage of the program and, from then on, we see that the program worked, we will try more and more, alongside the airlines, to seek to expand the program”, highlighted the minister, when commenting on the possibility of expansion of the discount to other audiences. Costa Filho stated that the program was built based on dialogue with airlines, as the government cannot interfere in ticket pricing. Despite this, the minister informed that the government monitors the practice of abusive prices and celebrated the 15% growth in the number of passengers, between 2022 and 2023. “This year [2023] we went from 98 million passengers to 115 million passengers, passenger growth of more than 15% in Brazilian aviation.”

Ports

The Minister of Ports and Airports also informed that President Lula is expected to visit the Port of Santos next month and announce new investments in the region. The biggest of them is the construction of a tunnel, which will pass under the sea, between the cities of Santos and Guarujá. The project is one of the main works of the federal government's Novo PAC, with an estimated cost of R$5 billion.

In March, Lula is also expected to visit the Port of Itajaí, in Santa Catarina, to kickstart the operation of the terminal, which is currently paralyzed. “It is a Port that has already generated more than 4 thousand jobs in that region and, unfortunately, it became unviable under the last government”, stated the minister. The resumption of port operations is underway by a company already hired on a temporary basis by the federal government.