Airport Experience® News - Post-Conference Issue 2026

PARADIES: Early on, it needs to be part of the planning process, and they should treat it like another food and beverage operation. Airports are under so much pressure to add lounges, and not just large airports. How do they deliver that experience that their customers asking for, and at the same time, be fair to concessionaires who have invested a lot of capital into these facilities? [Airports] are losing a lot of revenue because lounges are paying fixed rent versus percentage rent. BERNAL: I think airports are starting to see that it does impact their revenue. I think an airport has to decide their strategy. Are [concessionaires] part of the travel experience and convenience, or are we a profit generator for the airport? Do they still want us paying 16-18%-plus rent and not have the experience that they’re wanting, potentially, or is it a lower rent and more amenities to provide a better experience? Everybody’s got to have a seat at the table to talk about that. CRWYS-WILLIAMS: We’re committing to a [concessions contract] over 10 to 15 years on a set of assumptions and variables that then, can change radically within two years. But the capital all goes up front. We’ve got to find a way to have more flexible structures going forward that protect against that. PARADIES: Part of our job is educating. Airports want more data, so we need to give them more data in a way that they can understand it, consume it, and share it with their shareholders and city councils, etc. With lounges, specifically, I think we’re all working on how we turn a headwind into a tailwind, because it’s not going away. MBOYA: I think for us as F&B teams, we need to find a way to replicate some of that experience in our restaurants – whether it’s the seating, the music, the ambience of the restaurant – which would help drive some passengers back to our restaurants. However, that would drive up the cost of [buildout], so we’d be looking for longer tenure or lower rents. WARD: Turning to the ACDBE program, the future of the program is unclear. All of you partner with certified firms. How do you see the relationships evolving if the program is diminished or eliminated? MBOYA: It used to be presumed that you have certification, it will continue. You cannot make that presumption anymore. Secondly, it used to be that there used to be one guidance that worked for

almost everybody. Now it’s been left to interpretation, and different airports and different authorities and different bodies are interpreting it differently. Our problem is not that the rules are stringent or relaxed. The problem is the rules are not consistent across the board, and it’s changing at each and every location, so it’s very difficult to comply. And finally, we implement the rules that are instituted by airports. We continue to wait for direction from some of them. We do have contracts with our JV partners that we have to honor, but those contracts may have to be modified in order to comply with what the airports put forth as guidance. JOHNSON: It’s different in each city, but as that city makes a decision with how they want to move forward, we’ll move forward with them. It’s not our program, it’s a program between the airport FAA, and we’re just fulfilling their wishes. Some of these people have been our partners for 20 or 30 years, and they’ll continue to be our partners. Part of the beauty of this industry is the fabric of all the organizations that work within it. I think it would be a shame for us to lose all the small businesses and local businesses that make up what is an airport ecosystem. I hope that it stays where it is today. If we just go to bunch of big players fighting against each other as primes, I’m not sure it’s the airport is a great industry anymore. PARADIES: The emphasis on local will not change, [and partnerships are] how we accomplish it together. HUW CRWYS-WILLIAMS: I agree. And I think small businesses are far better at providing those localized experience and big centralized businesses, so they have a huge

Above: Steve Johnson of Avolta says few or no responses to certain airport concessions RFPs serve as a warning to airports that operators will only invest in deals that make financial sense.

role to play. MONTES: To conclude, I’m wondering, as leaders, what keeps you up at night? PARADIES: What CEOs hate more than bad news is uncertainty. I think going into this year, even though there’s a lot of uncertainty, there’s more certainty that there will be more uncertainty. I think we’re all living it and [are learning] how to be flexible, how to focus on what’s important and not get distracted. JOHNSON: We thought 2025 was going to be our first truly stabilized year post Covid, and it didn’t turn out that way. International traffic fell, Canadian traffic fell. So, there’s definitely uncertainty. How do we manage through inflation, with union wages are going up? We’re not being helped geopolitically, as far as people coming to visit, which is what we all live off of. BERNAL: The big thing that keeps me up at night, is not having our airport partners really truly understand the challenges that we’re facing. The RFPs and the business opportunities, that model hasn’t changed, and there’s not an understanding of the additional costs, whether it be labor, whether it be construction or, changing buying and travel habits. I think that’s something we, collectively as an industry, need to continue to work on. If those things don’t change it’s going to be a problem. We’re all here to grow our companies and grow our businesses.

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AX NEWS APRIL/MAY 2026