Airport Experience® News - Conference Issue 2026

ONE-ON-ONE

ONE AREAS Acquistion Integration Is In The Works, Creating One Cohesive Concessions Powerhouse

BY CAROL WARD

ditor’s Note: In the first few weeks of January, Carlos Bernal was on the road, visiting airports and personnel new to the Areas USA team. Bernal, CEO, is managing the integration of the Delaware North Travel Hospitality Services business acquired by Areas late last year. The Delaware North THS business was roughly double the size of Areas USA’s business prior to acquisition, so the integration is a massive endeavor. Bernal says the result will be “One Areas” – a cohesive company ready to manage existing contracts with excellence and compete for new contracts that make sense for the company. He spoke with AXN’s Carol Ward in mid-January, offering an update on the process and his outlook for future growth. E

WARD: Can you give me a sense of the size and scope of Areas USA now that the acquisition of Delaware North’s hospitality division has been completed? BERNAL: We closed on the transaction on November 24, which was a pretty exciting day. Clearly, we were working on it for quite a bit of time prior to that and continue to work on it today. Globally we will be about a $3.1 billion business, and when we look at the overall [concessions] space, we guesstimate that it’s about a $37 billion business. Here in the U.S., it’s hard to pinpoint, but doing a bit of math and making some assumptions, it’s about a $13 billion enterprise for the travel retail business, and we are estimating our U.S. business at about an 8%-9% market share. In terms of the actual business itself, we went from 10 airports with Areas [pre-acquisition], and now we’re in 27 airports. We had about 2,000 team members. Now we’re up to 6,000 team members. I never really focus on size – to me, it’s a number. I focus more on what we do and how we do it. I think one of the bright spots is that we’ve just added some really good talent to our team, and it makes us a better company. WARD: What does the integration process look like, and how is it going so far? BERNAL: Getting the deal done is phase one, and that takes a tremendous effort. That doesn’t happen overnight, of course.

There are many months of agreeing on the pricing and [the details of] the transaction, and while that’s all happening, even before we knew whether we were doing the deal or not doing the deal, we were doing a lot of planning. In terms of where we are today [mid-January], it was probably the worst time we could do a transaction. We closed on November 24. We have a fiscal calendar that ends on December 31. It was very important for us, from a people side, to get all the Delaware THS team members onto the Areas payroll system and the Areas HR system. Right out of the box, from an HR perspective and a people perspective, the team had to onboard 4,000 employees and get that done before the end of the year. That was a monumental task – it was like symphony orchestra, with all the instruments playing in tune to make that happen. Kudos to our human resource team and kudos to our support center team, because we did it. As of today, we are just one Areas. For Phase Two, we go into the integration mode of bringing in those specific airports into our operating systems and back-office systems. We do twice a week calls on this to make sure that we’re on schedule. Think about it. All the back-office systems – the menus, the recipes, the kiosks, the credit card machines – all those things now need to be converted to our system.

Above: Carlos Bernal, CEO of Areas USA, is leading the company’s integration of the recently acquired Delaware North Travel Hospitality Services, creating “One Areas” in the U.S.

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AX NEWS MARCH 2026