Airport Experience® News - Post-Conference Issue 2023

We have pockets of labor issues right now but as a general rule, I would say we’re fully staffed. If we can get them to stay for 90 days, they stay for four years. It’s the first 90 days [that are challenging]. We have plenty of employees. We have a lot of people who won’t work 40 hours - we give a bonus to work 37 and a half. Many of them, because the pay is so high, they’ll work 25 hours, 27 hours and that’s enough. They might call out on their Friday or Sunday shift because those are the two big call out days. They’ll have a side hustle. They’ll be on Instagram. They’ll [drive for] Uber. That fills in the gap of the 40-hour workweek for them. WARD: I want to shift to technology. Can each of you talk about what excites you right now and what you’re adopting to help your company appeal to the more tech-savvy travelers? JOHNSON: I’m on the board of the National Restaurant Association. We did a great survey in 2022 about what a consumer expects when they walk into a restaurant. Only 25% of baby boomers want technology. The rest of us want someone coming up to our table and talking to us. When you start going down the generations - Generation Y, Millennials, Generation X - over 65% of them want technology and don’t want somebody at their table. We are not building restaurants for us anymore. Our QR code technology today is in 210 restaurants. It did about $340 million in sales in 2022. This year, it’s going to probably do closer to $450 million as we’re adding more restaurant locations. If you look at labor productivity, we’re still operating at the same labor productivity that we operated in the 1950s. If you look at hotels, at rental cars, at banks, at airlines, their labor productivity has doubled and tripled and even quadrupled in some cases. So our job, this community’s job, is to figure that [technology] piece out because the consumer wants it. PARADIES: Self-checkout has been much more successful than I ever imagined. They’re very user friendly - the joke in my company is even Gregg Paradies can use it. But what’s the next thing? We don’t know but I think the industry needs to focus on what’s going to really make a difference versus what is it really a good press release. This technology takes a lot of resources to incorporate - it isn’t just flipping a switch - and it’s accelerating faster than ever. I’m

also very excited about what we’re doing back in the house to help our people be more productive. SVAGDIS: Right now we all have similar technology and the adoption rate continues to increase. The biggest challenge, quite frankly, [is getting] unions to be accepting of it, which they’ve gotten better, and then the employee to embrace it, which has come with time as well. During COVID we rolled out a lot of automation in the back of the house … because we couldn’t find enough managers. We had to be more efficient. So that kind of technology - we know it’s not consumer facing so we don’t talk about it. But we’re all doing that and it’s super critical for us to be successful. WILSON: You mentioned unions, we actually have a union group that finally accepted using a robot to help them bus the tables. It saves them steps, gives them more time to interface with customers. MONTES: All companies are increasingly under scrutiny for DE&I right now. Can you point to one highlight or one achievement in your commitment to DE&I? SVAGDIS: We’re using a third-party company called Inclusion Inc . We train the top 40% of our people. The first step in my mind is about awareness and about unconscious bias, and we’ve done a lot of training on that. But at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. What’s the achievement? For me, it’s the fact that every year I look at my employee base and I look at the middle management and then the VP and senior manager level, and our diversity, along with females at every level, has grown ten years in a row. We as an executive team have to own it. We have to drive it through the organization. And quite frankly, compensation is tied to it in our organization as well, which gets people’s attention real quick. MCOWAN: We are adopting a lot of the WHSmith global initiatives and there is still a lot of work to do on it. From a personal point of view, our business development team sits [with 18 people] and 13 of the 18 are female. That’s just a fundamental change. WILSON: Working for a family-owned business, it took them a while but they’ve embraced the idea of DE&I because they understand how it filters to the bottom line of the business at the end of the day. The conversation that we had over a period of almost 18 months was whether

Above: Delaware North’s James Wilson says his company’s approach to DE&I initiatives has advanced “leaps and bounds” in recent years. .

to put somebody in charge of this, and the brothers (owners) decided that, no, we all need to own this and we will have a steering committee. I think we’re advancing leaps and bounds in understanding the importance of DE&I within our company. JOHNSON: When I took over as CEO, it was there wasn’t any diversity on my leadership team. Today it’s 60%. In the middle of the pandemic we put a DE&I committee together for two reasons. First, to make a statement publicly about who we are. Second, to make a difference in an organization like ours. It came down to who we’re going to hire. Every single job for us has to have a diverse panel of people who have an opportunity to get the job. Once they have the opportunity, we find the talent. PARADIES: We started a diversity inclusion council July 2020, right in the heart of the pandemic, and we started an influencer committee underneath them. The transparency conversation with my leadership team and below just blew me away. What I’m most proud of is just how this has energized our team. We talk about retention of young talent. It’s amazing how complicated people’s lives are. But the transparency with our organization has really helped as we talk about hooking the heart of something bigger than just our companies. If you look back ten years ago, there was no diversity on our leadership teams, but it’s coming. It’s a journey and we have a long way to go but this will continue to be critically important to retain strong talent.

11

A X N E W S P O S T - C O N F E R E N C E W R A P - U P I S S U E 2 0 2 3