Editorial: Auckland Airport’s new mall more irritation for its biggest customers

EDITORIAL

Traffic chaos around Auckland Airport’s new mall has intensified long-standing tension with its main customers – the nearly 30 airlines that fly there.

Despite road management plans and other measures to cope with the opening weekend for its Mānawa Bay outlet shopping centre, it turned out to be a bigger event than anticipated as shoppers flocked to the area. The resulting traffic congestion meant airport workers struggled to get to work on time and airlines reported having to re-accommodate passengers caught in the jam on later flights.

This comes just after tens of millions of dollars spent on roadworks on the airport campus during the pandemic had made significant progress in solving long-running traffic problems at the airport, which handled 18.5 million passengers last year. As the country’s largest global gateway, half of those were international travellers.

While the urge to spurge at the shops is great news for the 118 retail outlets at the new centre, and a bright spot in a gloomy economy, airlines will hope consumers will button off during what is shaping up as a busy school holidays for flying. Today is the busiest day for flights around the country and the added risk of any delay is stress travellers don’t need.

It has been suggested by critics that Auckland Airport is primarily a shopping centre that just happens to have a runway next door. That may be a bit harsh but Mānawa Bay feeds that narrative.

An airline group says Auckland Airport has its priorities wrong.

The Board of Airline Representatives says the mall makes it harder for customers to travel and harder for airlines to operate and points out that busy shopping times around Christmas and Easter are also peak times for travelling.

Auckland Airport has planned its roading network to serve the shopping mall – with highways now pulling traffic from the north and south to the mall.

The board says airlines are forced to pay for part of this roading network through aeronautical pricing. They are used for a commercial purpose that makes working at and travelling from the airport harder.

Airport figures in its latest annual result showed that more than half of its $1.1 billion capital spending in the financial year was on commercial projects such as the shopping centre and parking facilities. Investment property and retail income helped the airport survive the pandemic and Auckland Airport is following a well-proven model used by its peers around the world to diversify its revenue streams.

Work on Auckland Airport’s integrated terminal is well under way and spending will step up in the coming years for infrastructure that will benefit both airlines and their passengers.

But airlines have baulked at the $3.9b total cost of the project and that is part of an undercurrent of bad blood between them and the airport around the latest five-year price-setting event. The Commerce Commission has found in a draft report that the airport’s excess profits may be as high as $226m over that period and the airport may well adjust its pricing if that’s the final verdict.

Mall traffic chaos happened against this backdrop. The opening shopping rush will inevitably calm down and traffic will ease but any extra cars attracted to the area will at the very least be another source of irritation for travellers, aviation workers and airlines.