Mes: diciembre 2018

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FAO Schwarz to open toy store in Midway as part of airport’s retail makeover

The city is planning to phase out the existing shops at Midway and replace them with 70 new retail brands by 2020.

Renowned New York toy store FAO Schwarz will join a revamp of the Midway Airport shopping concourse that’s on track to bring 70 new retail brands to the airport by 2020.
FAO Schwarz applied for a permit to add a store sign in the airport, according to city buildings department records. A city spokesperson confirmed the lease Monday but did not say how much space the store would take inside the city’s junior airport.
FAO Schwarz opened a 20,000-foot store earlier this year in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Plaza, nearly three years after its parent company, Toys “R” Us, closed the flagship location on Fifth Avenue because of rising rents.
Local 0fficials touted the first phase of Midway’s retail makeover this summer, when the airport opened a 15,000-square-foot food hall with a Billy Goat Tavern and a Big & Little’s, a popular Asian-Mexican fusion restaurant based in Chicago. A Coach handbag store, Tumi suitcases and Kiehls cosmetics shop will also open in the airport over the next year or so.
The city has hired New Jersey-based Hudson Group, London-based SSP and Vancouver-based Vantage Airport Group to help phase out and replace existing shops and restaurants at Midway. The companies will aim to strike a balance between out-of-town names like FAO Schwarz and “authentic local brands” like Big & Little’s, officials said.
“We’re seeing from feedback that passengers want more things that look like Chicago, to give them a sense of place,” city aviation department spokesperson Lauren Huffman said. “But they also want some of those bigger household brands that they’re already familiar with.”
The reshuffle coincides with the construction of a $104 million new security concourse set to be completed at the airport in late 2019 or early 2020.
Meanwhile, officials are paring down the list of architects who are vying to oversee the city’s planned $8.7 billion expansion of O’Hare Airport, where dozens of new gates and a new hotel are expected to be added by 2026.

Source: The Real Deal. Chicago

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Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIA) in time for the peak of the tourist season

Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIA) officially turned 75 years old on December 3, 2018, and the managing board plans not only to restore the beauty of the terminal building but that operations will be transferred temporarily into the terminal building in time for the peak of the tourist season.
According to the board on Tuesday, the airport facilities sustained severe damage at the hands of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017. Commercial operations were restored on October 10, 2017, a little over a month after the storms forced the closure of the airport facilities which were immediately taken over by the Dutch, French and US military authorities.

Project Manager Rob Noorman said on Tuesday that the migration project for the arrival and departure operations should commence next week. The project management team is currently getting ready for the dismantling of the pavilions, which will be done by the Event Star company.

A major part of the ground floor of the Terminal Building is beginning to take shape with a temporary layout as part of Package 1 – Temporary Operations. The temporary airline counters are being erected in the check-in area and the inbound/outbound baggage conveyor belts have already been tested and are in good working condition.

Also noticeable are the food-and-beverage and retail concession areas that will be ready for handing over to the concessionaires in the next couple of weeks. Returning concessions like Subway, AMA, Dutch Delight, Domino’s Pizza, Market by Villa, Taloula’s Flights, Relay, ESCA, Shipwreck Shops, Gouda Liquor Store, Le Bistro by Bacchus, Princess Promenade, Aunt Clara’s, Johney Burger and KAFFE will be available to the travellers and partially to the public.

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Dozen operators eye Montenegro’s airports

Over a dozen global airport operators are interested in the thirty-year concession of Podgorica and Tivat airports, Montenegro’s Minister for Transport and Maritime Affairs, Osman Nurković, has said. The future concessionaire will be obligated to make a minimum one-off payment of 100 million euros to the Montenegrin government and will be required to invest at least 85 million euros into the two airports, which are being offered to investors as part of a single package. The yearly concession fee will total 10% of gross annual income. «We have drafted the concession agreement, which is to be adopted by the cabinet shortly, after which we will commence tender procedures. We anticipate strong interest from investors».
Turkey’s TAV Holding, which operates nearby airports in Skopje, Ohrid and Zagreb has held talks with Mr Nurković over the upcoming concession. Others to have expressed interest include France’s VINCI, Germany’s Fraport, Dubai Airports Company and South Korea’s Incheon International Airport Corporation. The government hopes to complete the concession process by June 2019. «Currently, some fifteen leading global companies are interested and will take part in the tender. We expect to receive excellent offers. This way we can make a great deal for the airports and the state. The concession is vital in order for Tivat Airport to follow through with its plans to build a new passenger terminal, extend its runway and overhaul its taxiways», the Minister noted.
Montenegro’s Prime Minister, Dušan Marković, said the country’s economy depends on the successful concession of the airports. «Look at what our runways look like today … Our airports resemble refuelling stops. This is not a sale of state assets but rather a valorisation, which enables the state to obtain capital infrastructure with private money, which will result in significant economic benefits for the entire country», Mr Marković said. He added that under a private operator, the airports’ annual earnings should grow from the current four million euros to ten million euros.
Source: ExYu Aviation
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Another Brazilian airport privatisation package is moving towards fruition, but the pickings keep getting slimmer

Brazil’s regulator ANAC has approved draft documentation for the concession of 12 airports. The concession process was set in motion on 29-Nov-2018. This is the fourth concession tranche in the country since the process began in 2011.

The fourth tranche of airport concessions in Brazil has received ANAC approval for 12 facilities across the country, separated into three groups;
Each has an ‘anchor’ airport of sorts but with one exception those airports are getting smaller and less appealing;
The question now is what priority (if any) will the very small ones be given by the concessionaires?
Others have previously included São Paulo Guarulhos, Brasilia and Campinas Viracopos airports (Tranche #1); Rio de Janeiro Galeão and Belo Horizonte Tancredo Neves airports (Tranche #2); and Porto Alegre and Salvador airports (Tranche #3).

It is has not been an entirely satisfactory procedure with some well-above-expectations deals contrasting with disappointing traffic statistics as Brazil’s economy turned for the worse. The economy is slightly improved but it is a long time since Brazil was the “star B in the BRICs”.

A change of government may see the new Bolsonaro one, together with its Economy Minister, Paulo Guedes, a student both of Milton Friedman and the ‘Chicago Boys’ who revitalised the Chilean economy, turn to the free market reforms that succeeded in doing that in Brazil’s neighbour.

None of this has actually diverted interest in these concessions from domestic and international investors alike. Airport investors, unlike airline ones, are in it for the long-term. It is known that at least four of them would like to take over the Campinas Viracopos concession, including Flughafen Zurich, Brazilian private equity turnaround specialist IG4 Capital, and Chinese conglomerate Alibaba, as previously highlighted by The Blue Swan Daily.

Indeed, Flughafen Zurich, which has been investing in Latin America since before Brazil became the highflying BRIC, has indicated it would like to bid on all three of the blocks in the forthcoming tranche. In a way that is surprising because the process is now down to much smaller airports than before, the bone in the Brazilian expression ‘steak with bone’. So is there any steak in there? Are there, as in the Mexican concessions procedure, any ‘anchor’ airports?

There do appear to be what might be described as anchor airports, with between 2.9 million and 6.8 million passengers in 2017. They are Recife Guararapes (Northeast Group); Cuiaba Marechal Rondon (Central/West Group) and Vitoria Eurico Sales (Southeast Group). Their growth performance in 2017 was varied at between +4% and -3%, but that is not dramatic. The groups also include airports with traffic as low as 0.5 mppa in the Northeast Group and 0.18 mppa in the Southeast Group (statistics are patchy for the Central/West Group).

While airports offer alternative business development opportunities such as cargo, trading and logistics parks (even ‘airport cities’), maintenance, storage/breakage and a myriad of other aero and non-aero uses, an investor will usually look at the size of the passenger market first and whether there is a reasonable prospect of it being extended.

Taking the largest and most promising in this respect, Recife’s Guararapes airport, Recife is the fourth-largest urban agglomeration in Brazil, with four million inhabitants. That makes it a better ‘bet’ than Florianópolis (1.1 million) where Flughafen Zurich took on the concession in 2017. It is also on the coast and along with Fortaleza and Salvador, which were concessioned to Fraport and Vinci respectively in the third tranche, and Natal, which featured in the first tranche, the nearest air entry point to Europe and Africa.

International services already exist at Recife, amounting to a modest 6.3% of capacity but foreign non-Latin American carriers have made little impact with TAP Air Portugal and Air Europa amounting to only 2.7% of capacity between them. So there clearly is plenty of scope at Recife and has to be described far and away as the star prize in this set of deals