Goodbye End Of The Road

Air New Zealand’s shift from an end-of-the-world mentality to a Pacific Rim network carrier is reflected in Auckland Airport’s 30- year vision document, which kicks off saying: “We want the airport of the future to be a hub for travel in Australasia and the Pacific Rim and to provide an enjoyable and uniquely New Zealand experience for passengers and visitors. ” CEO Adrian Littlefield is clearabout the scope of his airport’s growth. “Auckland Airport sees the greatest opportunities for growth coming from Australasia, Asia and the Americas. We are working closely with our airline partners that service these markets to help stimulate this growth. Air New Zealand’s Pacific Rim strategy aligns particularly well with this. Air New Zealand’s new daily Singapore service and proposed alliance with Air China on Beijing are key examples of the type of market development we support. ” There are numerous challenges to the airport’s airy ambitions, of course. A rapidly changing passenger base, evolving aircraft, government conditions, strict New Zealand biosecurity rules and the need to significantly expand its asset base all place hurdles in the way of an airport sprinting to be fit for purpose in the future.

Growth in Auckland is coming from the Pacific Rim

Air New Zealand is still the main story as far as Auckland Airport is concerned. The airline’s Pacific Rim strategy is significantly reliant on inbound tourism, partnering at three key Asian hubs with three key airlines to enable connections: Air China at Shanghai Pudong, Cathay Pacific at Hong Kong, and Singapore Airlines at Changi.

CEO Christopher Luxon, promoted to the top job after markedly restructuring the airline’s international network to focus on the Pacific Rim, has moved his airline into alignment with its hub airport’s Pacific intentions – as well as plans outlined by tourism bodies,one of whose fern logo the airline’s jets now wear on their fuselage and vertical stabiliser.

Auckland Airport’s strategy says that it is clear that “the emerging economies of China, South-East Asia, India and South America are changing the dynamics of global air travel. ” The airport already sees flights around the 12-hour mark to Guangzhou (China Southern), Shanghai (Air New Zealand and China Eastern), Hong Kong (Air New Zealand and Cathay Pacific) to serve the Chinese market. A China Airlines flight also stops in Brisbane on its way to Taipei. Further flights are planned to Beijing on Air China as part of a strategic agreement with Air NZ announced during the visitof Chinese Premier Xi Jinping in late 2014.

The South Asian market is served via Singapore (Air New Zealand and Singapore Airlines, including a relatively new A380 service), Malaysia (Malaysia Airlines) and Bangkok Suvarnabhumi (Thai).

At the other side of the Pacific, South American flights are currently restricted to Santiago on LAN, with Air New Zealand’s Buenos Aires flights starting this December in partnership with Aerolíneas Argentinas, although an Aerolíneas Argentinas exit from Auckland in 2012 and Sydney in 2013 means that Air NZ is the only airline in the partnership flying to South America, unlike its other agreements.

In North America, Air New Zealand’s longstanding LAXLondon daily flight is supplemented by a further daily service and a thrice-weekly operation. San Francisco and Vancouver are also served, enabling both origin/ destination traffic and connections over the hubs of Star Alliance partners United and Air Canada, respectively.

Both Air New Zealand and Hawaiian Airlines operate Honolulu flights, with Hawaiian’s extensive route network over its major Hawaiian hub providing an opportunity for largely leisure traffic connections, although timings are about as attractive as they are for Australian Hawaiian Airlines passengers in Sydney and Brisbane.

Air New Zealand also intends to operate a further US flight, with Chicago, Houston and Denver mooted as destinations. All three airports are hubs for United, butDenver’s reduced role as a hub following the United-Continental merger, and its elevation at 1,665m above sea level affecting performance, mean that the smart money (and the Wellington scuttlebutt) is on Chicago or Houston. The latter was one of the intended first international destinations for United’s (then Continental’s) Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners.

The cost of the hub strategy for Air New Zealand, of course, includes accusations that the airline is failing to serve airports outside Auckland. Recent cuts to nonstop Christchurch-Narita flights have had many in the South Island fuming – particularly business class travellers who can’t continue their homeward journey from Auckland in a premium seat on all-economy Air NZ domestic aircraft. Hub growth from Auckland depends to an unquantifiable extent on the question of whether political pressure will cause Air New Zealand to refocus itself on Christchurch services.

Airport expansion is planned in four stages over 30 years

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Auckland Airport intends to start its expansion with a terminal consolidation and expansion by 2022. Initially, the domestic terminal (currently a 15-minute walk to the southeast of the international terminal) will be replaced by an extension to the international terminal. International flights will move into the extension, and domestic flights will take over much of the space that is currently dedicated to international operations.

Further terminal space and a large pier for the domestic side will be constructed to the east of the existing international terminal, and will initially offer a connecting passageway to regional stands on the site of the current domestic terminal. The single terminal operation will resemble a curved L shape, with landside facilities like hotels, transport and retail nestled in thecurve of the L.

To the north-west, extra terminal space and a significant expansion of the newer A380-capable pier will boost capacity, as will additional remote hard stands to the north and west of the existing facilities.

Phase two, by 2030, is principally about adding a shorter second runway to the north of the current airport area “by around 2025”. The new runway “will have an operational length of up to 2,150 metres and restrictions on flights to and from the east at night,” the airport states, hoping to mollify its relatively few NIMBY critics, thanks to the size of its full 1,500 hectare site.

Australian Aviation posed the question of why Auckland’s capacity is constrained until a second runway is built, while other airports like London Gatwick have a much greater capacity despite being one-runway operations.

CEO Adrian Littlefield explains: “The key challenge to deliveringcapacity similar to that of London Gatwick is the difference in the fleet servicing Auckland. We need to accommodate a range of aircraft from turboprops to A380s. This creates runway and airspace utilisation issues which make it more difficult to optimise capacity in the way London Gatwick has. ” The remainder of phase two will include a terminal expansion to the north of the 2022 addition which will boost capacity, and airside additions to improve access to the northern remote stands. To the south-east in the new domestic area, further stands – both jetway andremote – will be added. Phase two will also add a new air traffic control tower in the centre of the landside facilities.

By 2044, phase 3 will add yet more jetway and remote domestic stands to the south-east. Significant additional narrowbody and small widebody capacity will also be constructed with a new set of piers and stands to the north of the terminal.

Phase four, after 2044, will see the extension of the shorter northern runway to the east, which will require tunnelling the existing ground access below the extension.

Annual numbers of Chinese visitors to New Zealand are expected to double to 400,000 by 2020.

For origin & destination passengers, Auckland has plans to boost surface transport

In the context of hub-based growth, the airport’s intentions for additional ground access are relatively minimal. Initially, road transport will continue to be the primary means of getting to and from Auckland Airport, which will continue to serve foreign language bus tour groups well, but will not meet the expectations of international (and domestic) travellers who demand rail or at least bus rapid transit.

A pencil-sketched rail corridor plan has yet to receive approval or indeed a preferred chording from the CBD, with the airport proposing either a route from the north through the suburb of Mangere or from the east along the existing access from this direction. Auckland Council, a relatively newly amalgamated “super city” body created in 2010, has a significant role to play in deciding on the routing, as Littlewood explains, with rail “connected into the city’s central planning, which has a two-spur option, one from the south, one from the north, depending on how the council decides to do it. ” The airport CEO confirms that “ultimately we want to determine how and when it comes, and what form it takes, but we’ve allowed for it in terms of our planning. Our masterplan has been quite holistic in terms of approach, trying to account for these different demands. It always has these principles of being stageable, affordable, flexible, resilient, to deal with the changes both in aviation, transport and public demands. ” Auckland Airport is also taking steps to futureproof its transport strategy, accounting in the shortterm for the rise in services like Uber, but also for new options like driverless cars and driverless bus rapid transit. On driverless cars, CEO Adrian Little wood imagines that “they could materially change the productivity of current road networks sometime in the next 10 or 15 years.

We don’t want to be in a position where we are making big bets on modes of today, and finding out that was the wrong decision. We’ve tried to create a system that is flexible enough to deal with that change. ”

Betting big on the Chinese market with Chinese characteristics “

Annual numbers of Chinese visitors to New Zealand are expected to double to 400,000 by 2020,” the airport says in its most recent annual report, and its statistical projections model that a third of the Chinese population will take one international flight a year by 2032.

It’s not alone in expecting big things from the PRC market: “Boeing expects the number of aircraft in China will triple in the next 20 years and that Chinese airlines will buy more than 5,500 new planes by 2030,” the airport’s strategy states.

AKL is already working studiously to ensure it serves this enormous market – not just for inbound New Zealand tourism but for transit passengers too.

“We did a full review of our wayfinding system and introduced Chinese,” Littlefield explains. “We have added concierge and service agents to help guide people around.

We’ve worked on the other side, in terms of border activity, in terms of educating passengers around what they’re going to see and what they can expect. We’ve tried to remove the points of primary anxiety. ” Still, Auckland’s significant biosecurity operation poses unique challenges to Chinese visitors, who may not fully understand the reasons for and limitations of New Zealand’s strict screening process for incoming passengers.

We are already the second largest airport in Australasia for international travellers.

“Beyond that,” Littlefield continues, “the retailers have all had cultural training and cultural awareness training. They’ve multi-labeled a lot of the products and they’ve changed the product mix in a lot of the stores. Certain liquors, spirits, or certain cosmetics are very popular with Chinese and Indonesian passengers and we’ve made sure that those are in stock. ” Auckland Airport’s role in New Zealand tourism has led the airport to “actually take it a step further, and we’ve been training the tourism industry on Chinese cultural sensitivity and Indonesian and Indian cultural awareness as well,” Littlefield says. “For example, we’ve held for the past few years what we call the Asian summit, on behalf of the tourism industry, free for all to enter, and held an all-day event thinking about how you adjust your product mix and your proposition to target these new generations of customers. ”

In the meantime, improving the existing international terminal is under way

Over the last five years, Auckland Airport has been focusing on improving the look and feel of its international terminal, with the aim of being “a friendly, efficient and uniquely New Zealand airport”.

For example, at a junction that might otherwise be a boring double-wide passageway, visitors are greeted by an intricate wooden carving that resembles the artwork found in a marae, a Māori meeting house and communal sacred space.

Improvements to the inbound passenger experience have made a big impact. The airport has worked closely with immigration authorities to create and iterate the space where electronic passport SmartGate kiosks are located, which have dramatically reduced processing time for New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom and United States passport holders. For other travellers not on the intended expansion list of SmartGate passport nationals, the airport has concentrated on big data: pulling in information from airlines about forecasted arrivals and nationals, and transmitting that via a shared information screen available to immigration, biosecurity and baggage staff. The end result, combined with SmartGate, is a drop in queueing times.

“We have started to move to the collaborative decision-making model,” Littlefield elaborates, “whereby all the people are sharing all the data all the time and making decisions in real time, with planning resources much more attuned to demand, rather than looking at their own slice of that system and thinking about their own KPIs (key performance indicators). We’ve moved away from that to shared KPIs and we’re investing in technology to solve that problem. ” Another example from Littlefield: “In the baggage area, we take care of the baggage systems. We now have people on the ground who stand in the baggage area who have an iPad, and in real time can reallocate carousels depending on demand. So we can say there’s a condition over there or bags late there, or something’s gone wrong there, so there are queues building up. Rather than put the next flight on that carousel, they’ll move it over to this one to create that space and separation. That’s happening in real time. ” The airport is also sprucing up the rather dark and dismal baggage claim area – the legacy of a piecemeal terminal construction with multiple roof levels and the various historical attempts to make a unified space out of them – with an impressively light, bright and airyaesthetic, featuring premium-feel finishes with local blond wood and attractive carved accents.

Rather than reinventing the e-wheel, AKL is working with existing technology providers

One of the more interesting aspects of the airport’s recent work in e-enablement is its partnership with mobile personal travel organiser app TripIt. The partnership was announced back in February but is still very light on the details.

In response to detailed questions from Australian Aviation, Jason Delamore, general manager marketing, wouldn’t be drawn beyond saying the partnership “helps address a number of principles we feel are important. We are engaging with a world-leading technology company that specialises in making travel easier and this aligns closely with our customer focus. As travellers trend toward buying components of their travel separately, tools such as TripIt help manage and consolidate the travel experience in a way that adds value. By offering solutions such as TripItto the NZ traveller, we can help make travel easier regardless of what airline you travel with, or whether you are travelling economy, business or first class. ” Auckland Airport is also working closely with Gentrack, a New Zealand company whose Airport 20/20 management information system is used extensively by numerous airports. Being a local partner has its advantages in terms of early rollout of new features and some additional functionality, CEO Littlefield says, adding that “once you get to a point of having a verified source of information, you can start to do things differently. We can start to then get that information to passengers. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Where is your bag?’ ‘Don’t worry, you’ve got 10 minutes until your bag turns up, so you can spend some time not stressing about it, you can maybe spend some time at duty free’. Or ‘your bag is here’. You can also give advice on queue times at processing areas. That’s starting to optimise demand and supply figures in a much more effective way. ”Embracing the big data trend, Auckland Airport’s work is about taking the numerous disparate data sources from within the airport environment and using them effectively.

Global ambitions: goodbye, ‘end of the road’

In 2011, Airbus identified Auckland Airport as one of the airframer’s expected 80 “airport megacities” by 2030 – cities with over 10,000 daily long-haul passengers, and alongside regional counterparts like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

“We are not constrained like some airports in Australasia. We have always planned ahead and we have the land to grow and become an important hub airport serving Australasia and the Pacific Rim,” Littlewood says, noting that “we are already the second largest airport in Australasia for international travellers. ” With the chaotic plans for a two-airport Sydney, and a newfound sense of purpose and role, could Auckland end up taking the first place crown?