With the lack of travellers, airports are being forced to reconsider their designs
It'south difficult to tell whether Singapore Changi Airport is an entertainment complex or an airport. With its three-screen movie theater, an indoor butterfly garden, a rooftop puddle and inventive eateries, it attracts as many locals as travellers.
With more than 400 shops, including Apple and Tiffany & Co. (at that place are ii), Changi Airport would be the fourth-largest mall past the number of tenants if it were in the United States.
An audience that is both captive and often flush has made airport commercial foursquare footage some of the most lucrative in the world. Simply the pandemic has crushed the commercial calculus at airports, and no one is certain what comes next.
The leading airport for concession and retail sales in the United States is Los Angeles International, with revenue of The states$3,036 (South$ 4,144) a foursquare human foot, according to a 2022 written report from Airport Experience News. Chicago O'Hare clocks in second with US$two,718 in sales a square foot. Past comparison, the average mall retailer is around US$325 per square foot, according to 2022 information from CoStar.
But that's all gone now, said Alan Gluck, a senior aviation consultant at ICF.
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"In full general, sales are in the toilet," Gluck said. For example, concession sales at San Francisco International Drome in May were downwards 96 per cent from a year before. Duty-free concession sales were downwards 100 per cent, he said, because all the stores were closed. In May 2019, duty-free sales were US$11.5 million.
Until passenger traffic returns, Gluck said, aerodrome retail properties are not going to be profit centres, and even when it does return, information technology may be at reduced chapters.
"I believe that we need to reconsider existing heuristics unless we retrieve that client behaviour will return to what we now consider normal," he said, adding that activities like wellness screenings ofttimes cut into space for other needs, usually concessions.
Many concessions are probable to demand more space for social distancing, which will cut down on the number of retail units that airports tin can offer.
The very civilities that one time made airports a standout for turn a profit are the aforementioned things that are proving to be challenging. For example, Changi's theatres are still shuttered not just for pathogen protection but also considering traffic is too depression to justify the operating expenses.
"We will scale our aerodrome operations based on the book of passengers we serve," said Ivan Tan, senior vice president for marketing communications with the Changi Airport Grouping, which operates the facility.
"We will scale our airport operations based on the volume of passengers nosotros serve." – Ivan Tan
The airport's traffic has fallen to ane per cent of what it was a yr ago, which leaves little market for movies or gourmet meals, Tan said. The airport is using this time to shut Terminal ii to accelerate planned refurbishments, only the pandemic will cause some amenities to be replaced with new ones.
"The longer-term impact of COVID-19 on the facilities and amenities we provide remains to be seen," he said.
So far, the pandemic has non paused terminals planned or in progress in the U.s.a., although some drome operators are reconsidering traveller civilities.
Kansas Metropolis International Airport is in the heart of a United states of america$1.five billion final renovation plan to consolidate its three terminals into a single 39-gate giant, including a 2-storey fountain, a children's play area and updated concessions.
It'south not the starting time fourth dimension the drome has been remodelled during significant airline industry disruption: On Sep eleven, 2001, the airdrome was in the middle of a major overhaul. Changes had to be made to screening areas quickly, and interior and exterior glass fortified.
"In that instance, the projection was underway. The adjustments were made, and it wasn't too late," said airport spokesman Joe McBride. "We are still early this terminal project; the construction is ongoing, then nosotros are in amend shape than in 9/11."
Other projects underway, including at La Guardia Drome in New York and in smaller markets like Lafayette, Louisiana, are moving ahead only taking a wait-and-come across approach on adjustments.
New final construction should focus on space not merely for the coronavirus merely for other respiratory illnesses, said Dr Anthony S. Fauci, manager of the National Found of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"The crowded nature of things in an airport has always made me uncomfortable, particularly in a less modernistic i," Fauci said. "People are literally olfactory organ-to-nose waiting to go on the plane."
He said new terminals needed to let enough infinite for people to spread out, offer high-efficiency particulate air filtration and distribute free masks.
He would also like to run into more than wellness screening at airports to preclude the blazon of virus spread seen in Wuhan, Communist china, and Milan, Italy. Such testing could include temperature checks, questioning and contact tracing. Because forty per cent of coronavirus cases are asymptomatic, the task is challenging merely notwithstanding worthwhile, he added.
"You can't throw upwardly your hands and say it is impossible," Fauci said.
The key to making postal service-pandemic airports commercially viable is to brand the medical screenings uniform everywhere, said Vik Krishnan, aviation consultant at McKinsey & Co.
"Y'all didn't have different airlines touting their safety after 9/11," he said. Travellers will be more inclined to fly again if airports adopt the same safety standards now.
In Kansas City, officials are making adjustments equally necessary. If more than infinite is needed, their design has flexibility built in, something older airports can't practice as hands.
"Equally of now, we oasis't changed course or modified the existing new terminal design, but we are in the early stages of exploring how to heighten traveller safe and health," McBride said.
The new building volition requite the aerodrome more flexibility in dealing with this pandemic or future ones, including the possibility of conducting health screenings outside, said Laura Ettelman, a managing partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, an architectural and design firm in New York that is overseeing the airport renovation.
The pandemic will accelerate future terminal structure at other airports to contain flexibility, she added.
"Airports are difficult architecturally because they go outmoded quickly, so all the buildings we are working on today are well-nigh flexibility and more flexibility," Ettelman said.
"Airports are difficult architecturally because they become outmoded speedily, then all the buildings we are working on today are about flexibility and more flexibility." – Laura Ettelman
Other airport designers are following that same mantra.
"We are not scaling back at the moment," said Curtis W. Fentress, a Denver-based builder whose firm is involved in redesigning the international terminal at George Bush-league Intercontinental Airdrome in Houston, also every bit terminals in Nashville, Tennessee, and Orlando, Florida. "What we can all practise is infinite things out and make things as touchless as possible."
Fifty-fifty before the pandemic, he was striving to go on things contactless.
"You are moving enormous numbers of people through the aerodrome, so I introduce daylight to atomic number 82 and guide you through the edifice and take them be sanitary and feel equally clean and rubber equally possible," he said.
But even bigger changes will exist needed, said Henrik Rothe, a senior lecturer in airport planning at Cranfield Academy in Britain who has designed airports in 45 countries. The disruption to airports is the most complex always, and all stakeholders will have to come together to re-imagine them, he said.
The SARS outbreak of 2002 was a pandemic warning that nearly airports ignored, he said. In the long term, airports are going to accept to reassess their operations and perhaps go more oriented toward business and infrastructure than amenities.
"Airports demand to become multipurpose commercial centres, sustainable and resilient against disruptive events," Rothe said.
"Airports need to become multipurpose commercial centres, sustainable and resilient confronting disruptive events." – Henrik Rothe
By Kevin Williams © 2022 The New York Times
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Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/experiences/airports-are-reconsidering-their-design-247451
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