Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport’s effort to revamp its restaurants and shops — which was delayed amid contracting controversies and the COVID-19 pandemic — is ramping back up but will take years more to complete, airport and city officials said Thursday.
Hundreds of business people interested in opening restaurants or shops at the airport streamed into the Georgia International Convention Center and learned about the timing for concessions contracting.
The Atlanta airport, the world’s busiest, relaunched its concessions revamp effort last year, and started the contracting process for a dozen locations in November 2022. The process has long suffered from delays, and that is continuing. The city collected proposals from interested companies in April and has not yet awarded contracts.
The airport had originally planned to contract out for more than 100 locations by early this year. But with changes in airport leadership — including a new senior director of concessions, Scott Knight — officials now plan to start the next round of contracting this fall for a total of 38 eateries or retail locations across the domestic terminal and concourses.
Among the locations the airport wants concessionaires to open are a gourmet market with bar, a bistro with coffee, a national brand gourmet coffee location, gourmet markets, a cosmetics shop, apparel store and a variety of other restaurants and shops. Those locations will be spread across four contracts, for a total of 44,000 square feet of space.
Later this year, the airport plans to launch another round of contracting for 35 locations, including eateries, retail and services, spread across six contracts with a total of 40,000 square feet of space.
But there’s more than 300,000 square feet of concessions space at Hartsfield-Jackson, with existing restaurants and shops dating back to contracts awarded in 2012. That means there are many more locations to be refreshed.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, who spoke at the Thursday event, called it the largest number of concessions contracts to come up for bid “in a very, very long time.”
“Every year for the next couple of years, you’re going to see probably two or three packages,” of concessions contracts up for bid, said Tyronia Smith, assistant general manager of commercial revenue at Hartsfield-Jackson. Some may be to replace existing restaurants and shops while others may be for new locations, such as space available from shuttered airport smoking rooms.
The contracting spread across years is a shift from the airport’s past approach of contracting out for more than 150 locations across the airport all at once. That massive single batch of contracting meant companies that didn’t win anything worried about having to wait a decade for an opportunity so large — with stakes worth millions of dollars that prompted some of them to legally challenge the contracting decisions.
Then, plans to revamp food and retail outlets at the airport were delayed for years by contracting issues and by a federal corruption investigation at Atlanta City Hall, before further delayed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Smith said the airport officials are using consultants to advise them on “what the market wants.”
Existing concessionaires, originally on 7-year contracts with the option for a 3-year extension, received contract extensions during the pandemic, with many of them now in place until 2027 or 2028, according to Smith. That is delaying the refresh of concessions — and allowing the airport and city more time for the lengthy contracting process.
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