Airport Experience® News - Post-Conference Issue 2024

DIRECTOR’S CHAIR

Left: Capturing enthusiasm for whiskey and local products, the Distillery District store at Memphis International offers travelers a taste of hometown specialties.

WARD: I know you just finished a new concourse. What’s next for MEM capital projects? BLUE: Going back to that hub three decades ago, Memphis had three post-security concourses During our modernization effort, we consolidated down to a single concourse: Concourse B. That concourse was rebuilt, modernized higher ceilings, wider floor square footage, and more gates and opened in February 2022. Now we’re looking our terminal building - this was one of the main items that came out of our master plan, The original terminal building, I think it was commissioned in 1962. OF note, the city of Memphis is in the Madrid seismic zone. The New Madrid fault is about 90 miles away in Madrid, Missouri. Seismic code was not a thing 60 years ago when our building was built, so we need to seismically retrofit. The building also didn’t have fire suppression sprinklers. Furthermore, the building was built for a time when passenger aircraft had propellers on them and flew maybe 40 passengers each. SO there are times of the day where our building feels quite small and it doesn’t flow like a modern terminal building does. We lack some of the modern passenger processing amenities, like an inline security screening system. We have several reasons to tear into this building and we anticipate breaking ground on that project later this spring. Right now, it’s looking like it will take about eight years and $665 million. WARD: Moving into the concourse, let’s talk a little bit about concessions. How are concessions performing and what’s new with your program? BLUE: We are blessed to have two great master concessionaires. Our food and beverage prime partner is HMSHost and our news and gift prime partner is Paradies Lagardère . Each, of course, has several local ACDBE partners as well. Our annual spend per passenger is hitting record levels right now. For calendar year 2023 we’re at $10.89 – that’s more than a 13% increase over 2022.

thought that since most of the people coming and going either live here and get barbecue whenever they want, or they have visited and probably eaten barbecue two or three times already. But after we opened the Concourse, it was the number one thing we would hear about. One of the big brands here in Memphis is Corky’s. We partnered with HMSHost and they’re now offering Corky’s Memphis barbecue in one of their stores. WARD: Are you implementing any new technologies or any other sort of customer facing things that would enhance the passenger experience? BLUE: Paradies offers the self-checkout. Passengers seem to love the open concept and it blends very well with our modernized concourse. We have not talked about any of the remote ordering or the waiter-style service to the gate, but that is certainly not off the table. Our mission statement is the positively memorable travel experience. Our partners are on board with that and helping us deliver if it’s deemed that it’s going to be a value and something the passengers would want. At the moment, it doesn’t seem to be on the top five or top 10 list of passenger wants.

Some of that is due to some new offerings that have opened here in the last year. In 2023 we opened a Chili’s, an Omega Bodega and Rambling Joe’s Coffee Shop as well. The consolidation of our concession program from three concourses down to one, where all the passengers are, coupled with an increase in total number of passengers and coupled with new offerings, [has been beneficial]. The food and beverage side is doing outstanding, as is the news – we could not be happier right now with our partners. [One notable concept] is the Distillery District store by Paradies Lagardère, where they’re selling packaged Tennessee whiskey and [other products]. It’s very successful – we wondered a bit, but somehow it’s happening. WARD: With the single concourse, is your concessions program now right-sized for success? BLUE: When we opened the new concourse, one of the things that maybe we underestimated was the demand for Memphis Barbecue, specifically in the building. We have some of the best barbecue in the world, and being an origin destination airport, everybody has their favorite hometown shop. We honestly

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AX NEWS APRIL/MAY 2024