Taking the dining experience to new heights at airports

“Imagine in the next three to five years, we'll be having all those extra planes coming in,” Dewan said. “That’s the kind of traffic that we will be working with and that’s the kind of growth that is coming in the India airport market.”

Speaking about the food & beverage aspect of Araya lounges, Dewan commented: “We are a food company that firmly believes in offering the customer an airport lounge food experience which is unparalleled. For Araya, we don’t have a cost control department, we never look at that, we just invest in customer experience.”

Delaware North’s Grzechowiak called for a back-to-basics approach to airport hospitality which was lost in many airports due to COVID-19-related issues.

“I want to get back to the real, basic fundamental of your experience in interacting with an employee in an airport,” she said. “We know that personalisation is the way to grow future revenues with the new generations coming through our airports. That is the key to them [younger generations]. They want recognition.

He said: “We’re seeing them really picking their flights not based on loyalty for their airline, but for flight schedule, pricing etc, especially with the growth in leisure travel. And we see loyalty shifting more into the premium credit cards, which provide a lot of travel benefits and are very flexible in how you use those benefits. That’s an interesting shift.”

Gwilliam said one of the questions in the survey asked how a traveller would spend a US$200 voucher on anything in the airport. “It was no surprise that an airport lounge was ranked as the highest category in which people would spend,” he commented. “But we also saw other experiences that would attract spend from this voucher such as sleep suites and gaming lounges.

“One of the themes that we’re seeing in this FAB Conference is the growing demand for more premium services and experiences and our survey data definitely reflects that.”

Luton Airport’s Jennings gave some candid insights into the transformation of the food & beverage offer. Changes at the airport post-COVID included a reorganisation of how traffic flows past F&B venues and a greater mixture in the types of cuisines available, including some from “challenger” brands.

“COVID gave us a reset,” said Jennings. “The previous F&B space had been designed in 2014/2015 and things have moved on a great deal in terms of what passengers want. As a low-cost carrier airport we made a fundamental mistake in thinking we have low-cost spending passengers to match. We’d capped the potential and we hadn’t given passengers the choices they needed.

“We looked at proper pricing structures and architecture for F&B; looking at the way we actually provide genuine choice for our customers. That meant we reconfigured the F&B programme with fewer grab-and-go options and moved into casual dining experiences, offering a wider range of cuisines and covering all day parts.”

He added: “Our role as the airport operator is to be the expert in passengers. The data, the profile, the experience and everything else, because that’s our job. Our F&B partners are the experts in delivering. We have tried as much as possible to stay out of their way, let them deliver what they want to deliver. That strategy has been very successful.”