"Airport Amenities"

Sunday, September 22, 2002

AIRPORT AMENITIES
By Barbara Shea
Newsday (NY)


It was hardly the typical airport impulse buy. An Ohio businessman
connecting through LaGuardia recently bought a $1,700 mattress at the
Central Terminal's Brookstone outpost after stretching out awhile on the
display model. He was going to get the entire $2,600 vibrating
king-size, box-spring unit but wasn't sure his bed frame at home could
handle it, said sales associate Zanitta Whitworth of College Point.

Two soft, leather massage loungers outside the open-front store likewise
entice more triers than buyers ("I think we'll spend the two hours we
have to kill right here," said Ed Patterson of Hilton Head, S.C., as he
and his wife, Peggi, sank into the $1,300 and $3,200 chairs between
flights one recent day). But savvy frequent travelers buy after prices
are slashed on the demos, Whitworth said.

The store's best sellers remain travel items such as mini-pillows,
luggage locks and compact bags (often bought on a dash back from the
boarding gate after a carry-on is ruled too large). Still, Brookstone's
product range in its new LaGuardia MarketPlace location exemplifies the
expanding shopping options there and at the two other major New York
metro area airports - Kennedy and the newly renamed Newark-Liberty
International. 

Cavernous glass-and-metal terminal concourses that look like a
combination airplane hangar and suburban mall now offer spa services,
designer food and fashions, museum merchandise, high-end jewelry and
occasional live music and other festivities to entice today's
increasingly sophisticated travelers - who've lately also had more
airport "dwell time" on their hands because of earlier check-in
requirements, less frequent connecting flights and unpredictable
gridlock at security checkpoints since Sept. 11, 2001.

The global trend toward upgrading airport retailing by providing a mix
of trusted local and international brands was a late arrival at this
area's airports because their older terminals are often harder and/or
costlier to redesign. But if they now seem constantly under renovation,
it's because they are. That's progress, said Carlo Bianchi of the Port
Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the three airports.


"Once construction stops," he said, "it's like there's no future." (The
most obvious projects are at Kennedy: two new American Airlines
terminals, opening in 2003 and 2005, and the long-awaited AirTrain
monorail, also scheduled to open in two stages - the airport loop by the
end of the year; the link to Jamaica's rail hub early in the spring.)

Business travelers, increasingly combining work and pleasure trips,
often can find family space as well as office space at airline frequent
flier clubs. Troy and Jonie Braban of Melbourne, Australia, recently
caught up on social and client e-mailing at computers in British
Airways' spacious new Kennedy aerie while en route to London during an
extended business-vacation trip.

Kennedy and LaGuardia offer business centers where any traveler can rent
an equipped office cubicle, and at the three airports passengers hunch
over laptops in food courts or anywhere else there's a seat and a wall
outlet or a phone with a data port. (In LaGuardia's Central Terminal,
moguls with a nostalgic bent might fancy the row of old-fashioned
rocking chairs that face the runway as if it were an alpine view.)

You also don't need an airline club membership any more to enjoy a glass
of premium wine or a fresh microbrew, as bright theme cafes replace
dingy airport saloons (four in LaGuardia MarketPlace mall should be
transformed by year's end - one called Newsbreak plans a bar-long stock
ticker). 

As for food, the metro airport benchmark is celebrity chef Todd
English's Figs LaGuardia, offering table service plus a stylish pizza
bar around an open oven with roaring fire. It was a welcome respite for
sisters Molly O'Connor and Joan Clough, who stopped for a leisurely
luncheon that included buffalo wings and the signature fig and
prosciutto pie before going home to Kansas City after a recent New York
buying trip for their mother's consignment shop. Indigenous fare? The
most eye-catching venue is Newark-Liberty's Garden State Diner, which
could have been whisked intact from some rural byway into Terminal C.

Even fast-food fans can often watch their pizza being twirled instead of
thawed. And because onboard food is now even less likely to satisfy (if
it's available at all), a myriad of made-to-order sandwiches and
international dishes is taking over from those overpriced,
shrink-wrapped packets of mystery take-out fare. (Along with healthy
competition, the Port Authority also has made guaranteed "street
pricing" a proviso in all new airport retail leases.) 

Maybe you can't yet get Botox injections or LASIK eye surgery between
but you can have dental work at two local airports. When he's not
X-raying the wisdom teeth of stowaways to document their age for the
Immigration and Naturalization Service, Dr. Robert M. Trager of Roslyn
shuttles between LaGuardia and Kennedy to treat patients. On any given
day, the patients may include foreign travelers in native dress who have
never visited a dentist, a pilot or flight attendant who bemoaned an
aching molar in an advance transatlantic call and stationed National
Guard troops in camouflage garbwho keep their rifle within reach as they
slide into the chair.

While airport facilities such as medical offices and chapels, which
might stir negative thoughts, are usually located off the beaten path,
retailers naturally want to be in the Times Square of the airport. But
where are the busiest crossroads? Airports reflect two prevailing
philosophies - sometimes within the same terminals.

Some concourse developers believe stores can do better outside the
security checkpoint, where they're accessible not just to ticketed
passengers but also to the "meeters and greeters" who drop them off and
pick them up. That design seems to be working well at LaGuardia
MarketPlace. At Kennedy, however, the 16-month-old revitalized Terminal
4 shopping plaza - which was designed to do double duty as a
neighborhood mall - isn't being patronized by local residents as hoped,
and a few stores already have closed. On one recent afternoon, most
shoppers entering the H. Stern store (where jewelry costs $240 to
$29,000) were clutching plane tickets. Among them, Bret Rapport of
Oceanside and Sarit Elkayam of Manhattan, 27-year-old business students
at the University of Rochester who were browsing for engagement rings
before a flight to Spain. 

The other camp of airport planners, who contend that retailers do better
inside security, argue that most airport shoppers are the travelers -
whose foremost aim, especially these days, is to check in, get through
security and stay there until flight time. Thus, almost everything is
post-security at Newark's recently revamped Terminal C, where stores are
still opening on Concourse C3, which debuted last December. (Lest
travelers avoid bulky purchases that might encumber them, Newark-Liberty
and Kennedy offer staffed luggage-storage areas since self-serve lockers
have become a thing of the past because of security concerns.) 

Although air passengers are clearly a captive audience, they still view
airport shopping as a secondary goal. But retailers can dream.

Mused one manager, wistfully surveying a bustling post-security
concourse, "At some point, I want people to routinely say that they're
going to the mall to catch a flight."


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