In 1994 shortly after the newly adopted EU SLOT REGULATION 95/93 came into force, a group of EU coordinators decided to meet regularly in order to exchange on a voluntary basis their experience and try and harmonize the implementation of the Slot regulation across the EU. The EUACG (European Union Airport Coordinators Group) was born.

Since 1994 this group has been taking a significant number of joint initiatives to the benefit of the Aviation Industry.

Some examples of the achievements of this voluntary cooperation within the European coordinators community:

• European coordinators have been organising on a voluntary basis in Paris-Orly since February 1999 the “Joint Slot Swap Meeting” as it was originally named before becoming a Schedules Optimization Meeting (SOM). This event became a fundamental milestone of the summer season’s coordination process and is attended by over 100 airlines every year in order to finalize their Summer schedules while meeting at the same place coordinators and schedules facilitators of the EU and of Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. Coordinators from outside the EU also join regularly.
• EUACA developed on its own small budget a corporate website where each national coordinator maintains the information concerning the airports under its responsibility and which is considered as a reference for all air carriers and aircraft operators around the world.
• EUACA members also agreed on some Recommended Practices, published on the EUACA website, aiming at a common interpretation/implementation of some of the provisions of the Slot Regulation. Some of these recommendations and best practices have been included in the EU Regulation at the occasion of its several amendments.
• At least at 4 occasions (September 11^th, SARS, Iraq war, Economic downturn in 2008) the EUACA coordinators agreed on the best possible way to efficiently implement a waiver of the “use-it-or-lose-it” rule (or moratorium) that the regulator could formally decide by actually amending the Slot Regulation only several months after the concerned events occurred.
• EUACA organized 4 seminars to better understand and share with the stakeholders some issues linked to the Slot Regulation or to expose the EU coordinators community’s interpretation or implementation:
  • July 8^th, 2004: Seminar on “the common implementation of the Slot regulation revision 793/2004” held in Paris
  • June 28^th, 2006: Seminar on “Slot Trading” held in Amsterdam
  • September 30^th, 2009: Seminar on “Airport Access to Business Aviation” held in Amsterdam
  • September 29th, 2011: Seminar on the “impact assessment of the Slot Regulation” held in Amsterdam
• EUACA actively contributes to the Joint Slot Advisory Group under IATA’s auspices, which defines the worldwide airport coordination best practices, and elaborate the IATA Worldwide Slots Guidelines.
• Coordinators of Austria, Switzerland and France designed and implemented the same special procedures for the allocation of slots on airports concerned by the EURO 2008 soccer Championship.
• While each coordinator is using a coordination software tailored to its airports individual needs, EUACA voluntarily created and funded a combined database collecting the data from each coordinator and schedules facilitator of the EU and of Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. This database was originally designed to jointly fulfil the transparency requirement imposed by the slot regulation to all coordinators and facilitators, offering to airport users to view from a common single website the requested and the allocated slots for each and every coordinated and schedules facilitated airports in Europe. The EUACA combined database is now holding the data for 190 airports, updated every night, which represents probably the most accurate centralized source of information concerning the traffic expected for the current and upcoming seasons in the European network of airports. No regulation ever required constituting such a database and it is the achievement of a voluntary cooperation of the national coordinators.
• On its own initiative, EUACA signed in 2010 a memorandum of cooperation with EUROCONTROL in order to provide this Agency with airport planned activity data through a single channel: the abovementioned EUACA combined database. Since 2012, EUROCONTROL has been using these data for the traffic forecast of the next few days/weeks for the entire airspace under its responsibility (broader than the EU) and this source of information has proved to be more accurate than the previous methodology especially in the case of special events such as Olympic Games and EURO 2012 soccer Championship.
• EUACA has been proactively working with IATA to elaborate the new Industry communication standard based on XML technology, which suits better to computer-to-computer communication than the 1950’s type B SCR messages.
• Some coordinators, using the same coordination software, have already developed a common on-line access to their individual database for their airports users.
• Nordic coordinators have decided to pool their human and IT resources to save on costs while remaining close to their airports problems and close to the airports users. Others are already working in a similar direction of optimized cost efficiency. Exchange of staff members have been organized for training purpose or to temporarily strengthen the manpower of an EU coordination during specific sport events (Olympic Games in London).
• The EUACA also spent a lot of energy in the enhancement of the level of quality of service provided by its members. Some members initiated periodic airlines surveys that they shared with their colleagues and this process has now been implemented by several coordination bodies across the EU.
• EUACA took the initiative of the set up of the Worldwide Coordinators Group  (WWACG) and represents the nuclear of the worldwide organisation of Coordinators and schedules facilitators. WWACG achieved in 2013 the Observer Status with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).
• EUACA is a member of the Observatory on Airport Capacity created in 2008 by the European Commission and is co-chairing with ACI-Europe one of the 3 working groups of the Observatory.
• EUACA is a permanent member of EUROCONTROL’s Agency Advisory Body and of the Airport Operation Team.