"Colorado Springs airport remodeling includes 8 new restaurants"

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Colorado Springs, Colo., airport remodeling includes 8 new restaurants
The Colorado Springs (CO) Gazette


Eight restaurants highlight a $9.2 million remodeling and expansion of
the concession areas and security checkpoint at the Colorado Springs
Airport.

Construction began last month on the project, which will add a
CNBC-themed newsstand and widen the concourse at the security checkpoint
to speed passenger flow. Most shops and restaurants will remain open
during construction, scheduled for completion next spring.

The concessions and checkpoint work is among three major construction
projects totaling almost $19 million in and around the passenger
terminal that will be finished in the next year and are designed to make
the airport more efficient and passenger-friendly.

"The terminal was built in 1994, well before the additional security
requirements that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks," said airport
spokeswoman Erica Hupp. "When these projects are complete, they will
improve the feel and the efficiency" of the terminal.

Other projects include redesigning and upgrading the airport's
short-term parking and rental car lots as well as remodeling the
terminal's baggage processing area to accommodate baggage screening
operations in front of each airline's ticket counters.

The first project passengers will notice is the $750,000 baggage
remodeling, which starts next month and will allow the baggage screening
operations to move by mid-November. That will allow more airlines to
install self-service check-in stations near ticket counters.

The airport has signed a seven-year contract with The Paradies Shops to
open the newsstand and two other gift shops in the terminal. Airport
officials selected Creative Host Services Inc. to open the eight
restaurants and are negotiating a contract.

The first four restaurants -- Pizza Hut, Quizno's, Pikes Perk and Cafe
Azul & Cantina -- will be part of a food court opening in December that
will replace Gate 5A and the Falcon's Nest Deli. The newsstand and a
gift shop also will be on the main concourse.

Four more restaurants -- A&W, Fresh 'N Smoothies, another Pikes Perk and
a Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant -- will replace the Pikes Peak Cafe
and Pikes Peak Deli and Bar in an expanded concessions area created as
part of a widening of the main concourse.

The Paradies Gift Shop also will be expanded as part of the project. The
restaurants and expanded gift shop will open in January, when work will
begin on a waiting area that will be built outside the security
checkpoint.

The project will double the width of the concourse at the checkpoint to
allow more room for waiting lines and secondary screening areas. Hupp
said the narrow checkpoint has become a "bottleneck" that slows
passenger screening during peak travel periods.

Hupp said Creative Host and Paradies will spend $4 million to build the
restaurants and shops, and the airport will spend $5.2 million from its
reserves and special fees passengers pay to airports to widen the
concourse, concession and waiting areas.

The parking and rental car project will cost $8.2 million, collected
from a special fee rental car customers pay, to switch the two lots and
build canopies as well as kiosks for rental agency employees that will
take care of customers picking up and dropping off rentals.

After the project is complete next fall, customers returning rental cars
won't have to drive through the airport's passenger pickup area, Hupp
said. Travelers often must walk long distances to unstaffed lots to pick
up rental vehicles, she said.

The three projects will create some disruption for passengers but will
not trigger delays in clearing security, Hupp said. The projects have
been scheduled to avoid major disruption during the Thanksgiving and
Christmas holidays, she said.


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