JULY/AUGUST 2021 / V19 N235
TO-GO COCKTAILS BOOST RE VENUE SERVICES AND AMENITIES
REBOOT Blurring The Line BETWEEN F&B AND RETAIL
Labor Challenges CURB F&B REVIVAL
AX Conference KEYNOTE SPOTLIGHT
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12 Best of Both
Food and beverage and retail have traditionally been two unique offerings in airports, but recent years have seen some merging of concepts, a move hastened by the pandemic and a need for more grab-and-go food and drink options.
16 Bottoms Up
Emergency orders that allowed foodservice establishments to continue serving alcohol despite dine-in restrictions also allowed many airport concessionaires to sell adult beverages to travelers to take with them on the go. The result was a welcome boost to bottom lines.
20 Reopening Roadblocks
Food and beverage demand has rebounded in airports during the summer travel surge, but now operators are facing new challenges, the most prominent being the lack of front-line workers crucial to meeting passenger expectations.
26 Keynote Spotlight
Erica Orange, executive vice president and chief operating officer for the Future Hunters and keynote for this year’s Airport Experience Conference, discusses ways to appeal to a new traveler and stay relevant in a new landscape.
28 ACDBEs On The Rebound
The pandemic was devastating for many airport concessions businesses, but many are building back despite extraordinary pressures.
3 Letter From the Editor-in-Chief 4 Data Check
32 One-On-One
6 Latest Buzz
34 Advertising Index 35 Before You Take Off
Survey results recently released by TripAdvisor suggest the national rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine is driving a renewed interest in travel.
LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B redevelopment, the largest P3 project in U.S. aviation, is nearing completion.
9 Director’s Chair
Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport completed a four-phase concessions overhaul right before the world locked down in March 2020. Director Chad Newton discusses weathering the storm and the sputtering return of leisure travel.
Specialty retail was challenging even before the pandemic, and with more people shopping online now than ever before, travel retail is adapting. Marco Passoni of TW.O & Partners discusses adapting the specialty retail experience for the traveler of tomorrow.
In May, a competitive skateboarding event featuring prominent names in local scenes around the country took place in a dormant terminal at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.
A X N E W S JU LY/A UG U S T 2 0 2 1
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KEYNOTE SPOTLIGHT:
ERICA ORANGE Adaptation and Innovation Key To Meeting New Challenges
Editor’s Note: Erica Orange is executive vice president and chief operating officer of The Future Hunters, a future-focused consultancy offering insights into market and consumer trends. She is also the keynote speaker for the 2021 Airport Experience Conference, sharing her thoughts on the evolution of the modern consumer. As a prelude to her presentation at the upcoming conference, she joined AXN’s Shafer Ross for a discussion about what travelers are expecting as they return to the airport and travel.
Above: Erica Orange, executive vice president and chief operating officer, The Future Hunters
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A X N E W S J U LY/A UGU S T 2 0 2 1
ROSS: How have consumers, and by extension travelers, changed due to the pandemic? Are there any new trends, desires, demands, expectations to note? ORANGE: Very simply, I think that one of the things we have to start getting our heads around is that trend and counter-trend are not opposing forces, they are complementary forces. On one end of the spectrum, a lot of the consumerbased trends now are in the e-commerce space – that’s not news to anyone, it’s accelerated during the pandemic. That’s something that has staying power, and we know that people have expectations around speed based on being home for so long. They looked to these tech-based solutions to deliver things very quickly to them, at home, when they needed them. At the same time – and that’s why I mentioned trend-counter trend – there’s a new demand, respect and resurgence of the offline. This is something I was tracking even prior to COVID, so COVID was just the accelerator. And that’s really the bow to wrap around all these questions: what we’ve seen is this COVID-accelerator effect. It is hitting the gas on trends – it didn’t create new trends, it just sped up existing ones. We’ve seen for a while an increased desire – particularly in younger people – for the slow, the tactile, things that are more rooted in the sensory, so experiencebased travel, experience-based retail. So you see this bifurcation between very high-tech solutions and very low-tech, offline, simplistic solutions. And that’s going to stay with us. ROSS: How have shopping practices/habits that were trending pre-pandemic been affected by the pandemic? What do we know about the experience consumers are expecting from brick-and-mortar businesses? ORANGE: One of the trends, again pre-COVID, is the rise of experiential retail. People want to go in and have something that is truly unique, whether it’s a brand experience, whether it’s using technology in-store – the fact that Google now has its first brick and mortar store is very telling and very indicative of
SERVICES AND AMENITIES