Airport Experience® News - Leadership 2022

Q & A

GAINING ACCESS AMAC’s Wimbush Discusses Business Barriers and Access To Airport Opportunities

BY C AROL WARD

Editor’s Note: Eboni Wimbush took the helm at the Airport Minority Advisory Council in October 2021, as the concessions industry was emerging from the worst of the pandemic. She quickly assessed the myriad challenges facing women and minority-owned businesses in the airport industry and has structured an agenda to tackle some of the sector’s longstanding issues as well as new challenges that have cropped up in recent years. With 2023 on the horizon. Wimbush recently spoke with AXN’s Carol Ward about AMAC’s key priorities, particularly as they relate to the Airport Concessions Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program and meaningful access to concessions opportunities at U.S. airports.

WARD: Now that the worst of the pandemic is over, can you offer a sort of “state of the business” from the ACDBE perspective? Obviously each experience is individual but what underlying threads are you hearing? WIMBUSH: The story is different depending on where you are in the country – which airport, which terminal, et cetera. The good news is that domestic traffic recovery is certainly approaching pre-pandemic levels and people are spending money on travel. For those ACDBEs who are positioned in airports that are mainly business travel or on international terminals, it’s a different story though. Our ACDBEs have come through a really challenging time, although of course some did not make it. The underlying thread is cautious optimism. People are excited and people are happy that travel seems to be thriving again. There are still pressures, and the pressures are even more magnified for ACDBEs that don’t have the deep, deep financial reserves that some of our big companies have. Labor pressures are real. People are being creative and that’s been helpful, but young people are not returning to work in the way that they used to. That means we’re still paying overtime because of the shortage in labor. Hours are still

reduced. The other things that are clear, in terms of common threads, is the rising cost to build out concessions space and the supply chain issues. All of these pull on profit. WARD: Looking ahead to next year, what are key priorities for AMAC as an organization, particularly in terms of priorities for the concessions side of the business. WIMBUSH: AMAC is undergoing its first-ever strategic plan. We’ve had leaders who had key focus and strategic agendas, but as a board and as a national office, we are undergoing our first strategic plan. It will span from 2023 through 2026. We believe that this will help us laser focus over the next three years to really prioritize our resources and our strategy. We’re having series of stakeholders’ conversations. We’re not just talking to our members [but our followers as well.] We’re going to talk to people in different forums through different surveys to really understand how we can strengthen our value proposition and identify how we can help in this critical time that we’re in. Through our professional development committee, we are really going to focus in and lean into a program that we had framed out but hadn’t really put as much emphasis on. It’s called the business capacity accelerator. It will be a focused

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