We’re Not Designing Airports for People, Dubai Airports CEO Suggests

If you’re tired of trudging through massive terminals to make your flight connections, you’re not alone. Even industry leaders agree that airports have become too big for most people. At the SITA Air Transport Summit in Brussels, Dubai Airports CEO, Paul Griffiths, shared an alternate vision for tomorrow’s airport design which breaks away from vast airport cities, to airports on a more human scale. “In my view, we’re heading in the wrong direction,” Griffiths says. “With bigger and bigger airports we get bigger walking distances, less intimate experiences and greater difficulties in customers making connections.” He suggests that no performance statistic is more important to airports than ensuring passengers can “very conveniently and easily connect between flights.” Griffiths acknowledges that the growing numbers of us who will fly over the next fifteen years——an additional 1.8 Billion people annually in some parts of the world—require an upgrade to