Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) has released new details on its latest concessions expansion. A mix of national, local and global brands, 15 concepts total will be added to PIT’s new and existing terminal spaces.
Bryan Dietz, senior vice president of air service and commercial development at PIT, said the new concessions will “fill the categories that we are hearing from our passengers that we need the most,” he said. “That is mostly sit-down dining and coffee-led offers, as well as some specialty retail such as sports apparel, amongst others.”
Dietz explained that PIT passenger levels are about 18% above 2019 numbers, and the variety of carriers serving PIT has expanded as well. “Part of this what’s driving [the concessions expansion] is the growth that we’ve seen in air service and range of passengers that we have. We now need to make sure we have the right offer for those coming in.”
The PIT concessions program was previously managed by Fraport USA, but the rocky relationship was finally severed in September 2023. At the time and amidst litigation, PIT was managing the concessions program, and that structure continues with the latest concessions additions. “We have a license agreement in place with our partners, and we work with them just as you would see at many other airports,” Dietz says. “Some of our partners, like Hudson and SSP [America] will operate multiple sites, but also there are some that are new to our airport like Atlas and Tailwind Concessions.
“We want to have an experience and an offer that matches what an origin and destination airport should have, so we’re bringing in local as a part of the offer as well,” Dietz continued. “One example is a direct lease with Café Conmigo from Wexford, Pennsylvania, that will be operating a coffee and tea house. We want to offer a national, global, and really uniquely local experience for this new travel market that we have now.”
Among the list of new concessions are the well-known Shake Shack burger franchise, Mexican cuisine from Mi Casa Cantina, Bad Egg breakfast bar, Stack + Press Delicatessen, and Camden Food Market (all operated by SSP America); MAC cosmetics, a Duquesne & Co. gift shop, a Champion City Sports store, and Hudson News (all operated by Hudson); a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop operated by Atlas; a Sambazon Acai Bowls operated by Tailwind; and local coffee shop, operated by the brand’s owners. The airport also plans to renovate and expand several existing concessions, including clothing and shoe store Johnston & Murphy as well as tech retailer InMotion.
Those concessions will complete the commercial offer in the center core of the airport, Dietz says, but he adds more opportunities may break in the future. “We’ll see where there are category gaps,” he says. “We still want to do more with specialty retail, more with apparel.” He added that PIT will leverage its assets to provide a more experiential offer for travelers.
“We have a whole team that surveys [travelers] and scrapes the internet, trying to understand what people truly, genuinely want,” Dietz says. “[We want to] provide experiences that encourage people to want to get to the airport early, encourage people who maybe have one item in mind [for purchase] to walk away with five. These first 15 locations are to make sure we’ve got the basics in place, so that people feel good about the next tier of opportunities we can look at. And we don’t know what that even is yet, but we constantly want to make sure we’re in touch with what people could be wanting.”
