My Love-Hate Relationship with Dubai Airport
A shopping mall with planes
For those who are new—welcome! The newsletter structure is simple: a main feature on some aspect of airport architecture, and some combination of the following sections: Notes From the Road, What I’m Writing, What I’m Reading, and What I’m Listening To. Enjoy!
Dubai Airport is an airport I love to hate.
The ADP Ingénierie-designed Terminal 3 that opened in 2008 is a formidable edifice. The terminal and its two concourses, A and B, covers 18.4 million-plus square feet over 10 floors and serves as the 24/7 backbone to Emirates’ global network. The terminal headhouse itself hides below the tarmac — there is minimal structure to see at ground level — allowing travelers to check in, drop their bags, and proceed through passport control and security all on a single level before ascending to Concourse B (or catching the train to Concourse A that opened in 2013).
Credit where credit is due: It’s a genius design for a site-constrained airport. And Dubai Airport as a whole does its job extremely well, processing nearly 87 million passengers last year — the second busiest in the world — across its three terminals and four concourses. No small feat.
But Terminal 3 itself is not the focus of my disdain. It’s where travelers spend the majority of their time at Dubai Airport: the concourses — or should I say shopping malls?
Terminal 3 has a lot of retail space. According to operator Dubai Airports, there is nearly 234,000 square feet of retail space operated by Dubai Duty Free in concourses A and B alone. To put that in perspective, Atlanta, the world’s busiest airport, only has 230,000 square feet of concession space across the entire airport.
No wonder Emirates’ hub feels like a shopping mall.
But it’s more than just the amount of concession space in Terminal 3. It’s how it’s laid out. In Concourse B, travelers are funneled into a central corridor that is lined with shops where you lose all sense of the best part of being at an airport — that sense of journey, of flying off to points far and wide (and the planes). Yes, travelers can walk on one of the two outer corridors lining the gate areas but the space feels secondary to the main event, shopping. The gate areas themselves are separate from the corridors.
Concourse C, which is technically part of Terminal 1 but connected airside to Concourse B, is even worse with no outer corridors and only the shopping arcade for travelers to traverse while waiting for their flights.
One of the defining features of a great airport is transparency. That ability to see where one is going. That may be the views practically from curbside to tarmac under the big roof of Eero Saarinen’s iconic Dulles Airport terminal or, for a more contemporary example, Luis Vidal + Architect’s London Heathrow Terminal 2. Travelers enter under a big roof and, while they can’t see through to the ramp — security sits in between check in and departures — once they pass through security the exit opens onto a shopping area with a vista of the tarmac and journey ahead.
And Dubai Terminal 3, as impressive of a structure as it is, just lacks that transparency.
I don’t fault Dubai Airports for leaning into concessions. Non-aeronautical revenues, in other words anything you buy in an airport from a novel to chocolates, is big business.
“Marketing analysts recognized that the most profitable resource was a traveler locked in transit limbo. By the mid-1990s … the airport atrium became an anchor for high-end stores, fast-food stands, and other concessions,” Alistair Gordon wrote in Naked Airport in 2008, the same year Terminal 3 in Dubai opened.
Dubai Duty Free reported revenue of $2.16 billion across Dubai and Al Maktoum airports1 in 2023. And, if I’m doing my math correctly, that’s equal to more than $5,000 per square foot across its roughly 430,550 square feet of retail space.
In the 1990s, airport concession sales per square foot were roughly 3-4 times that of regular malls, Gordon wrote. That stat appears to check for Dubai Airport given that some of the most profitable malls in the world appear to have sales in the $1,000-2,000 per square foot range.
I applaud an airport operator for taking advantage of a lucrative opportunity, just not the idea of designing the entire airside experience around it (and don’t get me started on lounges open to the concourse below but that’s a topic for another newsletter).
Neither Dubai Airports nor Groupe ADP, which includes ADPi, replied to queries about their design ideas behind Terminal 3 and its concourses.
Notes from the Road
I got a fun treat flying out of Chicago O’Hare the other day: I was able to use United’s PreCheck Touchless ID! I covered the rollout for The Washington Post in February but had yet to actually try the new process. When certain PreCheck-eligible travelers check in for a flight departing from a participating airport they are given the option to opt in to the touchless ID process that verifies one’s identity through facial recognition. Now that I’ve used touchless ID, I have to agree with all of the travelers I spoke with — the process is faster and pretty seamless compared to regular PreCheck. And, as an added bonus, I was able to bring my son through with me, though they did have to scan his boarding pass.
What I’m Writing
Stewart Airport has, for my entire career and well before that, been billed as New York’s next big airport — a hope that’s never come to fruition. Now, the Port Authority has a new plan to boost Stewart’s fortunes: use its ample unused space as a “home base” for private jets that have no where to park at Teterboro or Morristown. I spoke with one of the developers, Sky Harbour, and multiple local officials about this plan and everyone is keen to see more activity at Stewart. (Gothamist)
The other week I learned about the "Dutch Roll". A motion much like the “the rhythmical flowing motion of a Dutch skater on a frozen canal.” (Travel + Leisure, thanks for the opportunity,
!)Singapore Airlines has offered passengers injured on flight SQ321 that hit severe turbulence over Myanmar at least $10,000 in compensation. Lawyers say it’s “not a bad offer.” (The Washington Post)
Canada’s Transat, the owner of Air Transat, had a tough February-to-April quarter. Competition intensified, and Pratt & Whitney engine issues, strike threats, and economic malaise weighed. Still, the airline is optimistic on its new joint venture with Porter Airlines. (FlightGlobal)
What I’m Reading
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has killed (“indefinitely postponed”) congestion pricing in Manhattan. While much has been written about it, I appreciated this take by New York Magazine’s Adam Davidson:
“Like many imperfect but necessary innovations, congestion pricing doesn’t poll well. But it’s a crucial tool that ultimately benefits everyone by making city streets more navigable and safer, while also making it easier both for those who do drive and the non-driving masses to get around.”
And maybe the problem with congestion pricing was just marketing?
“Congestion pricing is actually really great for drivers. ‘In a way, it's one of the most pro-driving policies. If you choose to be in your car, you are paying with your money or your time. Here, you will pay something, but you will actually get good service in return.’”
Jens Flottau wrote a good deep dive for Aviation Week on the Airbus A321XLR’s entry-into-service later this year. As expected, the plane has taken a slight range haircut from its 4,700nm spec owing to weight added during the certification process but the planemaker still believes it will be able to “meet everything that we have sold for 90% of city pairs.” The A321XLR is scheduled to debut on revenue flights with Iberia in November.
Both Dubai and Al Maktoum airports serve the Emirate of Dubai but the former handled 87 million passengers in 2023 compared to far less than a million at the latter. One can surmise that the vast majority of Dubai Duty Free’s revenues were generated at Dubai Airport.