Airport Experience® News - Conference Issue 2026

STORY

Deanna Zachrisson Was The Leading Force Behind Concessions At San Diego International Airport BY SALLY KRAL

Before Deanna Zachrisson, who until early 2026 was director of terminal business development at San Diego International Airport (SAN), became the aviation industry professional she is today, she was simply a travel enthusiast. “I’ve always loved traveling and I lived in Sweden during my late teens and throughout my twenties and traveled a lot while living over there,” she says. “When I came back to the United States, I got a tip about a job at Seattle-Tacoma and I could think of no better fit because it meant that I got to go to the airport every day for work. Even if I was not getting on a plane, just being in a place where planes are coming and going all day long, just the vitality of that – it’s a bug that bites you. Maybe it doesn’t bite everybody, but it certainly bit me.” That feeling has remained for 26 years, Zachrisson asserts. “I think of myself as a quintessential AvGeek” she says. “Travel got me in and the vitality of the industry kept me there.” Having studied media and communications with a focus on public relations during her time in Sweden, Zachrisson started at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) in 2000 as marketing communications manager. “I was initially doing marketing of the major capital expansion projects that were going on at the time, including the redevelopment of concessions, and so I got involved in concessions quite early and found that to be super exciting, complex and intellectually challenging,” she says. “And what I liked about concessions too is that there was this direct connection to improving the experience of the traveling public – it’s a tangible thing when you develop something that people gravitate to.” After six years marketing new concessions development at SEA, Zachrisson became business leader for the airport’s dining and

down to SAN in the summer of 2011 to review proposals, interview proposers and ultimately help select the new concessionaires. But she wouldn’t yet take on an official role at SAN. First, in 2015, she moved on from SEA to become director of business development and marketing at Santa Barbara Airport (SBA). “It was a smaller airport but a great way to broaden my experience,” she says. “Looking back on it, it was one of the best decisions I made because in a smaller airport, you do everything. I negotiated airline agreements, I managed rental cars and fixed base operators, I even did offsite land development at the airport. It was a really great experience.” Six years into Zachrisson’s tenure at SBA, SAN came knocking again, this time offering her a position managing the development of the concessions program for the $3.8-billion New Terminal 1 project, which was already under construction. “That was a hard one to pass up; it was a clean slate,” she says. “And I had a long term connection to SAN already, going back more than a decade. The opportunity and the challenge really attracted me.” High Risk, High Reward When Zachrisson began at SAN in early 2022, it was a trial by fire. “When I got here, the terminal was in construction but the pandemic had thrown a monkey wrench into a lot of things,” she recalls. “The project was moving forward but concessions were not moving forward. The concessions at that point were pretty much just a variety of colored blobs on a diagram without any utilities planned. “The project was far behind, so there was a little bit of panic,” Zachrisson continues. “Pretty quickly after I got here – I think six weeks in – I had to go

Above: Deanna Zachrisson, director of terminal business development at San Diego International Airport from 2022 to early 2026, has been named AXN’s Property Manager of the Year.

retail program, responsible for the phasing and redevelopment of more than 93 dining and retail locations. “I was very fortunate in my time in Seattle that I got to be a part of the redevelopment of concessions twice,” she says. By 2011 Zachrisson had clearly made a name for herself in the industry and an opportunity came knocking at San Diego International Airport (SAN). “San Diego was coming off of a master concessionaire and they were redeveloping their program, and their CEO at the time reached out to my director and asked if I could help them with the selection of their new concessionaires.” And so, while still managing concessions at SEA, Zachrisson periodically flew

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AX NEWS MARCH 2026