Demand and supply
In the third article in our series, we look at how airports around the world have created vastly different developments that reflect the user demand, and what airports can learn from these examples.
In the two previous articles we looked at the factors that underpin the success of landside developments: the ability to identify demand; leveraging the airports’ accessibility; and aligning the commercial positioning to the demand.
There are three types of developments:
1. Retail-led
Singapore Changi’s Jewel is a prime example of a retail-led development. Situated at the east of the island, away from city centre with its numerous shopping malls, the airport’s cheap and plentiful parking, good transport links, and sizeable local catchment create a good opportunity for the airport to provide an attractive enviroment.
Changi's Jewel goes beyond providing a few retail stores and restaurants for people who happened to be at the airport. It was purpose built to attract consumers to the airport, and then to provide an environment which would make people want to stay – and then offer them opportunities to spend. This approach of first creating an environment that people want to visit, and then curating the retail and food & beverage offer, creates a compelling reason to visit the attraction time and time again.
2. Business-centred
The Circle in Zurich Airport provides an example of a business-led proposition, complemented by retail, services, and restaurants to cater to the worker population that will call the Circle home.
As with the Jewel, the Circle boasts good transport connections, by tram, train, bus, car, and, of course, plane. The airport has capitalised on this by creating an attractive office location complete with all the amenities expected by demanding workers. Onsite healthcare, day-care centres, hairdressers are available, as well as co-working spaces and conference centres for occasional use in a convenient location.
The Circle is ideally positioned to provide an alternative to the city centre for businesses, particularly those that require the connectivity beyond Zurich or Switzerland.
In order to make the development a success, the Circle didn’t just try to provide office floorspace, but thought about what would attract both workers and businesses to it.
3. Commuter-focused
Airports with transport links, such as Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, can take advantage of the high-volume landside footfall to provide an offer that caters to time-poor, repeat visitors.
Schiphol Airport's offer combines retail, food & beverage, and services located on, or next to, the primary flows, recognising that the busy commuter does not have the time to deviate from their daily journey.
The commercial positioning and placement is also ideally located to cater to the airport travellers, making the offer work for both commuters and airport passengers.
In these examples, the airports have had to consider if they unserved demand (such as Changi) or if they could create demand (Zurich's Circle) by providing a tailor-made environment, or – as in Schiphol's case – they only needed to align their offer to the existing footfall. Once the demand had been established, centred around the airport’s accessibility, the right type of offer needs to be curated to maximise the success of the development.
Chris van Ryswyck