Your Concessions Are a CX Strategy (Whether You Treat Them That Way or Not)

Ask a frequent traveler what they remember most about their last airport experience, and you'll rarely hear them describe the gate area. More often, the story involves a meal that surprised them, a retail interaction that felt genuinely helpful, or a coffee counter that moved too slowly when they were already running late.

Concessions are not peripheral to the customer experience (CX), more accurately dubbed the passenger experience for our industry. For most travelers, concessions are the experience. They're the part of the terminal where time is actually spent, where money changes hands, and where the airport's brand promise is either delivered or quietly broken.

Yet most airport and terminal leaders still frame concessions almost entirely as a revenue strategy. This includes:

●      Revenue per enplaned passenger

●      Sales per square foot

●      Minimum annual guarantees

These metrics matter, but they capture only half the picture. The other half — how concessions shape what passengers feel, remember, and say about your airport — rarely makes it onto the dashboard.

That gap is your opportunity to turn concessions into a CX strategy.

The Difference Between a Revenue Center and an Experience Touchpoint

There's nothing wrong with holding concessions to revenue performance standards. The problem comes when revenue is the only lens.

When concessions are managed purely as financial assets, decisions get optimized for yield rather than experience. Operators stack high-margin concepts into every available square foot. Menus get simplified to increase throughput. Staff are measured on transaction speed rather than guest interaction quality. The result is a terminal that's commercially efficient but experientially forgettable, or worse, frustrating.

The airports earning the strongest loyalty and the highest satisfaction scores are the ones treating their concessions program as an integrated layer of their passenger experience strategy. They ask not just, "What will generate the most revenue in this location?" but "What does a passenger traveling through this terminal actually need right now, and how can we deliver it in a way that reflects who we are?"

Those are very different questions, but a people-before-profits strategy leads to very different outcomes.

Four Ways to Align Concessions with Your Passenger Experience Mission

Shifting the frame doesn't require scrapping your concessions model. It requires layering intentionality into decisions that are already being made.

1. Audit your concessions mix through the passenger journey lens. Walk your terminal the way a traveler does at 6 a.m., at noon, or at 9 p.m. during a weather delay. Where are the friction points? Where does the offer fail to match the moment? A premium steakhouse concept near a gate serving regional commuters isn't just a poor revenue bet, it's a misaligned experience. Map your concessions footprint against your passenger profiles and travel patterns, not just foot traffic counts.
2. Define your service standards and share them with operators. Airport-managed service standards rarely cascade to concessions staff in any meaningful way. Yet the traveler who just had a frustrating security experience doesn't know or care that the coffee counter they approach is operated by a third party. They're experiencing your airport. Work with your operators to establish clear, observable service behaviors that reinforce your terminal's brand, not just the individual brand's. That includes greeting standards, problem resolution expectations, and communication practices.
3. Treat your concessions staff as ambassadors, not just operators. The frontline employee behind the counter is often the only human interaction a passenger has during their entire time in your terminal. That's an extraordinary influence. Invest in brief but consistent service orientation for concessions staff. Instead of lengthy training programs, focus on clear communication about who your passengers are, what they're going through, and what "great" looks like in your specific environment. When employees understand the bigger picture, they show up differently.
4. Create feedback loops that include concessions experience data. Most airports collect passenger satisfaction data at the terminal level. Few break it down in ways that actually inform concessions decisions. Build listening posts with brief digital surveys, exit feedback kiosks, or an analysis of social media mentions. These will give you specific data about how concessions are landing experientially, not just financially. Then use that data in your operator relationships.

The Loyalty Math Worth Running

In my book, “Experience Is Everything: Making Every Moment Count in the Age of Customer Expectations,” I make the case that every interaction a customer has with your brand is either building or eroding loyalty. The moments we treat as routine are often the ones that matter most.

For airports, concessions are routine in the operational sense. They're anything but routine in the passenger's memory. A traveler who misses a connection and finds a warm, efficient dining option with staff who treat them like a person — not a transaction — walks away with a story. A traveler who stands in a slow-moving line, staring at a menu that doesn't match the hour or their budget, walks away with a different story.

Both stories get told. Both stories shape whether that traveler chooses your airport when they have a choice, recommends it to colleagues, or posts their experience where others can see it.

Passenger loyalty isn't won exclusively at the gate or the ticket counter. Much of it is won, or lost,  at the sandwich counter, the wine bar, or the newsstand. The airports that understand this treat their concessions program not as a financial asset to be optimized in isolation, but as a living expression of what they believe a great travel experience should feel like.

That's the shift worth making. And it starts not with a new operator contract, but with a new question: What do we want passengers to feel when they walk away from every single one of these touchpoints?

Once you can answer that, everything else — the mix, the standards, the staffing, the measurement — follows.