Auckland Airport’s new chief operating officer, Chloe Surridge, sees herself as a bit like the conductor of an orchestra.
But with the rapid return of planes and passengers during the past year, after plunging to 50-year lows during the pandemic, it hasn’t always been sweet music for those passing through the airport. Lost bags, long waits to be processed, more bussing from planes, aggravated by extreme weather, have left many travellers frustrated and annoyed.
Surridge has had a career at the sharp end of travel, including key roles in the world’s biggest cruise company and at Air New Zealand, and now faces what a former colleague says is her biggest challenge.
“The airport really makes sure we are playing the right sheet of music, we’re playing it on time and they all have the right instruments and then together we make beautiful harmonies,” Surridge says.
“But as soon as somebody doesn’t, if there’s a bum note, then it puts everything out of whack.”
The airport company has about 570 staff but is at the heart of a complex ecosystem that employs 20,000 people, including airlines, their suppliers, government agencies, and other businesses on the wider airport campus.
Surridge has been in her new role for three months, after last August finishing at Air New Zealand, where she had management jobs in key operational areas. Her appointment is part of the big executive shakeup that’s been happening at the airport company since the arrival early last year of chief executive Carrie Hurihanganui, also ex-Air New Zealand, where her last role was as the airline’s chief operating officer.
Surridge says that after being close to the eye of the storm at Air NZ for more than two years during the pandemic, last year she felt it was time for a break. Since 2016 she’d headed the airline’s Wellington Airport operation, procurement and supply chains and global airport operations — with 2000 staff — as they were thrown into chaos by the pandemic, then had to scale up rapidly as mass travel resumed last year.
“I think a lot of people came off the back of that and were ready for a change,” she says. “There was the great resignation across the world and maybe I’m just another statistic.”
She slept for much of the first three months and then was a full-time rowing mum for her teenage daughter.
Employment consultants came calling for Surridge around Christmas and she began work at the airport company in May.
She had worked closely with Hurihanganui in her supply chain role at Air NZ, and Surridge says her appointment is part of a customer-centric focus at the airport.
But among the 15.5 million customers who passed through the airport in the past 12 months (nearly 80 per cent of pre-Covid levels), there are many who had a poor experience. The understaffed global aviation system is creaking under the strain, and Auckland Airport is no exception.
Another former Air New Zealand colleague, Board of Airline Representatives executive director Cath O’Brien, says Surridge is adept at dealing with operational challenges, but thinks she’ll face some of her biggest hurdles yet at Auckland Airport (AIAL).
“The biggest challenge for Surridge at the outset is the infrastructure she has inherited.”
O’Brien was formerly head of regulatory affairs at Air NZ, and now represents close to 30 airlines flying to this country. She says the airport company has underinvested over many years, resulting in some terminal and tarmac assets that are now difficult to work in, and to travel through.
Some spaces in the terminals are no longer suitable for the job they need to do, and that makes operations tough.
“Chloe Surridge understands what it is like to run an airline business at AIAL. This is a good thing – it means she understands the challenges airlines and ground handlers face getting the job done.”
Already, says O’Brien, Surridge has demonstrated that she will work to solve problems in partnership with airlines and ground handlers.
However, congestion and challenges at the airport are likely to get worse before there is any improvement.
Among the problems airlines are already experiencing are airside construction sites and interrupted pathways to aircraft, which result in ground handlers having to cross the live taxiway more often, leading to delays in unloading aircraft.
Over time, gate numbers for aircraft will reduce before they expand, leading to increased bus operations.
Space pressure on arrivals will be as it is today for some time to come, says O’Brien. “And even with the best will in the world, there are limits to what operational improvements are possible here.”
Surridge acknowledges that there have been problems, saying it is essential to get ahead of them by communicating clearly with the network of agencies, airlines, and ground operators.
“How do we get ahead of the curve and how do we make sure that everybody’s got the right data, that we’re starting to move the right people into place?’’
Work was being done on ways of sharing more predictive data, in a bid to head off problems.
The airport was also working on more efficient use of baggage belts by ensuring luggage from multiple flights isn’t ending up crowding just one of them. And the airport company — one of New Zealand’s biggest by market capitalisation — has also put some staff into the arrivals area to help with inquiries and make sure people are in the right queues.
Surridge has worked closely with ground handlers throughout her career in New Zealand.
She says that in the early stages of emerging from the pandemic, finding enough staff was a problem; now it’s training them.
Work is already underway on the new domestic terminal — integrated with the international building — but it is not due for completion until later this decade.
Test piles are now being bored up to 11 storeys deep into the airfield as the terminal goes into the final stages of design.
Across the 30,000sqm footprint of the new domestic terminal more than 14 test piles are being drilled up into the ground.
The new terminal will have more aircraft stands and 40 per cent more space than the existing one. In the meantime, the outdated domestic terminal is having yet more work done, including new toilets and signs.
Planning is also being done for a busy summer, with a rise in capacity across the Pacific to and from the United States.
Surridge has worked on both sides of the fence — for an airport (leading Invercargill Airport), an airline, and now an airport again (Auckland). Battle lines have again been drawn between the airlines and Auckland Airport over its proposed aeronautical price rises (some of which are more than doubling) but she says this age-old friction can be isolated.
“I’ve worked in commercial areas of the business and I’ve worked in operational areas of the business and everything in between. You may disagree in a commercial way, but fundamentally, operationally, what I’ve always found is that everybody really works together well collectively and I don’t say that lightly.”
Surridge’s parents came to New Zealand from England when she was a child. She grew up near Te Anau and went to Fiordland College, where she enjoyed studying languages.
“I went to France on exchange AFS and that was probably where things started to open up for me in terms of what was possible around the world.”
Returning to New Zealand, she veered away from university and headed overseas again, working in hospitality in London and then applied to work at Carnival Cruises.
She worked her way up through the company to a key management role and learned lessons that stayed with her, about the importance of customer focus and getting the best out of staff.
“One of the things that you can’t get away from is, if you don’t have a team that will follow you into a fire, literally, then you know you’re on your own pretty much.”
Shortly after starting with Carnival, Surridge was aboard the cruise company’s ship Celebration in 1995 when an electrical fire left the ship, carrying 1700 passengers, dead in the water near the Bahamas. There was a grounding, near-riots on board, and emergency evacuations.
“All great work stories,” she jokes now. “Dealing with those crises really shows you how to lead a team and it also shows the power of people and what people can do in those situations.”
She also met her (now-ex) husband, who also worked on ships.
Surridge had a fascination with processes — working out the most efficient ways of doing things. “My brain has always worked like that, from my first job waitressing in Te Anau: how do you make your trip from the restaurant to the kitchen and back again the most efficient?”
She has been able to apply that thinking wherever she has worked. “The logistics, I think, of ports and airports, cruise lines and airlines are so similar. Ships are bigger and slower, but fundamentally it’s the same logistics exercise. It’s a big supply chain of people and cargo and how do you move things around the most efficiently.”
Surridge rose to be the hotel director at Carnival Cruise Line, overseeing crew on many ships and being responsible for revenue generation, accommodation, guest services, training, and ship logistics.
After close to 14 years with Carnival, it was time to come home. She did a year of study (languages and political science at Canterbury University) and then life took another diversion — with her young daughter she went to Sicily to start a language school, specialising in teaching nautical English as a second language.
Surridge has no regrets about not doing more tertiary study.
“I get this question a lot as I coach and mentor a few people coming through. It depends what career you want to get into. I didn’t really know the career that I wanted until I was in it, and then it all made sense to me.
“Of course, if you’re a doctor or a lawyer, I’m not quite sure if I would want you skipping a degree, but there are different pathways and there are different opportunities all over the place.”
From Sicily, feeling the lure of New Zealand and the need to forge a corporate career, she took a job as chief executive of Invercargill Airport in 2011. It was a transformation role: the terminal was old and an earthquake risk, and something needed to be done. Rather than opting for a piecemeal refurbishment, Surridge pushed for a rebuild and the council-owned company’s board agreed.
“That involved demolishing the entire terminal — changing the tyres when the car is moving.”
It was a question of getting the balance right. “With regional airports, you try not to overbuild, you’re trying to think as far ahead as possible and trying to build modularly so that you can add on easily should you have larger aircraft or changes in security.”
She worked closely with Air New Zealand and in 2016 took the Wellington Airport manager’s job, with 330 staff from check-in to ramp operations. And by the way, fog, rather than wind, is the main problem in the capital during winter.
Surridge then moved to Auckland, where she was put in charge of Air NZ’s procurement at a time when Hurihanganui was making changes in the airline.
“We used to say [in procurement] that we would buy everything that’s in a plane that would fall out when you turn it upside down, but we were looking at engineering parts as well.”
The supply chain was being transformed and Surridge dived deep into that, picking up knowledge and building relationships that would help when supply systems were in peril as the pandemic hit.
“When we went into lockdown, that was probably when you see the true benefit of the supply chain coming together.”
It meant quick work to figure out what had to be shut down, and embedding a long-term strategy for the recovery.
The breakdown of the usual supply chains meant a bit of Kiwi ingenuity was needed to get desperately needed PPE for crew. Staff in China would go around shopping for a box of masks a day and ship them back to New Zealand at the end of the week.
“It was very tough. From a supply point of view, it was how you’re going to manage my risk.” While there were difficult conversations with some suppliers, others needed to be supported through the pandemic because they would be needed when aviation recovered. About a third of the 300 people who worked in supply chain roles lost their jobs.
Her next Air NZ role, as group GM of airports in New Zealand and around the world, threw up the challenges of working with different border requirements between countries and different work requirements. “Some of our staff were working in full medical gear, they’re sweltering in summer and couldn’t go home. They had to isolate at the airport. The sacrifices people made were phenomenal.”
There were more sleepless nights helping to get the airline’s operations up and running again. Surridge left the company as that was well under way.
“I thought once it was all done and everybody’s flying again, it would be a good time for a break and to do something different.”
She says the pandemic pushed all parts of the aviation system together closely.
“The thing I remember most, apart from all the phone calls at all hours of the day, seven days a week for years, was the ability to pick up the phone and talk to whoever you needed to. You form new relationships because you’re all in the same boat wanting to find a good solution.”
Surridge is now likely to be spending a lot more time on the phone, to keep the airport humming as the summer squeeze comes on.
Grant Bradley has been working at the Herald since 1993. He is the Business Herald’s deputy editor and covers aviation and tourism.
The airline sold its last slots at Heathrow in 2020.