The COVID-19 pandemic has airport executives scrambling to adjust to the precipitous decline in air travel. Many terminals look like ghost towns today, but industry executives across the country are confident that passengers will eventually return. Airports, however, will likely need to operate differently in a post-coronavirus world.
Alvaro Fernandez de Mesa is an associate for North American design firm Stantec, a leading airport terminal design firm. Fernandez de Mesa has ideas on how airports will need to alter operations and facilities to meet changed expectations. He spoke with AXN’s Shafer Ross about what passengers are going to be looking for in a post-COVID airport experience.
Ross: When we talk about planning for a post-COVID world, what does the timeline for that look like?
Fernandez de Mesa: I think it’s going to be a phased approach…. We know certain stuff already. We know social distancing is a key thing, hygiene is a key thing. There’s a little bit of an etiquette in terms of not spreading the virus…. Some [fixes] will have bigger implications than others, in terms of cost or changes, but I think again we’ll have to be learning from it, because there’s new things coming up almost every single day about this situation.
Ross: What kind of features are passengers going to be looking for when deciding where to shop or eat in the airport?
Fernandez de Mesa: There was something already happening pre-COVID. Airports were evolving and changing the typical retail and food and beverage approach, and we started seeing in some airports certain types of services you see out there right now – like Uber Eats and things like that – those were starting to be implemented in terminals. I think they’re going to grow at a faster pace now, because those types of approaches will probably improve social distancing. That’s going to definitely change how we plan and how the space is arranged. Before, the classic arrangement was a cluster of different retail units or food and beverage units, and maybe there’s a different approach to it.
Ross: Zooming out to the overall airport experience, what do airports need to do to make passengers feel confident traveling after COVID-19?
Fernandez de Mesa: The worst thing about traveling is probably queueing. To keep it simple, queues have to be reduced. They won’t be scrapped, but you want to keep the distance in a queue. Right now, the way the numbers are running, probably in the next months queues not going to an issue, but later when [passenger] numbers increase, they will be. It’s going to be impossible to actually handle that amount of people waiting while [requiring] distance between them. I think there have to be creative ways to actually reduce the queues and I think technology will play a big role in all this.
Technology will help separate people and process people faster, and also inform people on the situation at the moment. I think there’ll be an implementation of technology and innovation throughout the whole airport process and terminal. You can create a seamless travel experience and avoid all the crowding and the queues. I think that’s critical because I can’t see people accepting [a requirement of] queueing.
With technology, there’s always something that comes in parallel – that’s the whole privacy issue. I think that’s a main reason why biometrics has been very slow to be adopted. People are concerned about how their information is handled, and that’s a fair thing. The idea of the biometric journey, where you enter the airport … and all the doors open for you by just showing up yourself – you don’t have to pull out your passport, you don’t need your boarding pass – is a collective benefit for everybody. [Right now] is a great opportunity to actually start pilot testing on passengers, using all this technology, getting used to it, and then in time it will just become normal.
Ross: Seating in the airport was crowded long before COVID-19. How do airports account for social distancing when planning seating options?
Fernandez de Mesa: It’s really hard to keep that distance with the current arrangement of the hold rooms, and I think there are options for more individual seating. I think in the short term there’s not much of an issue because typically hold rooms are open spaces that are shared with other gates. With the decrease in the number of flights happening at the same time, there probably won’t be an issue with using areas adjacent and providing distancing. But I think in the future there will probably have to be some changes in terms of providing distancing.
