AIRPORT REPORT: DUBLIN
Irish flavours and up-market appeal Among the new facilities on offer at Dublin T2 are two new bars especially created by SSP. The Flutes Champagne and Wine Bar has been designed to offer passengers the opportunity to start their journey in style. Its sleek and cool colours are designed to create an environment that has particular appeal for women passengers, but also tempt couples or business travellers looking for an alternative to the business lounge. Serving a range of Champagnes and wines by the glass or bottle,
together with premium bottled beers, quality coffees and selected spirits, Flutes offers a menu packed with locally sourced dishes, such as platters of William Carr smoked fi sh, Irish cheeses, or charcuterie from Gubeen farm, County Cork, as well as open sandwiches of chicken and avocado, Dublin Bay prawns, and goat’s cheese from local dairy Cooleney. At breakfast time, passengers can enjoy Irish Granola, fresh Danish
pastries, or continental-style platters of fresh fruit salad, natural yogurt, Cooleney Brie, Gubbeen cheese, and traditional Irish ham with freshly baked mini croissants. There’s also a distinctly Irish fl avour to the menu at the gastro-pub
Slaney. Choices include Irish breakfasts of soda farls and oatmeal porridge, or Eggs Benedict. Imaginative use of a variety of seating-types and lighting means that
lone travellers, families, couples and groups feel at home. The design features original images of the River Slaney from award-winning Irish landscape photographer Enda Cavanagh and striking contemporary accent pieces including eye-catching chandeliers crafted by internationally renowned Irish fashion designer Louise Kennedy.
Heathrow after the opening of Terminal 5 and DAA has approached the entire opening with the same cautionary attitude. “We are having a gradual run up of the facilities, it was not just a case of
open the doors on the day and they arrive, it has been very carefully rolled out. At immigration for example, Aer Lingus went through the whole process, including operating fake fl ights and volunteer passengers to ensure the process ran smoothly,” says Siobhan Moore, communications manager for DAA. Several thousand members of the public were hired to carry out a
thorough test of T2’s facilities and evaluate passenger fl ow in the months prior to opening, with check-in, baggage drops and security systems all put through their paces. When Dublin opened its fi rst civil terminal in 1941, the building was
striking with its cutting edge design and its modernist façade and that tradition has continued in the construction of T2. When it came to terminal design and layout, DAA with its lead
architects Pascall+Watson and Arup, were heavily infl uenced by the mantra that passenger comfort come before most other considerations. Upon arriving at the car park or one of the drop off zones, passengers need to
take just one set of stairs or an elevator to reach the main hall with just security between them and a level corridor leading straight to the 19 gates of Pier E. With sweeping curved roofs and aluminium panelling, T2 is designed to
resemble an aircraft wing, softening the divide between airport and airline for the passenger and creating a strikingly iconic design on the airport skyline. A steel and glass façade with a minimal number of curved columns
helps T2 make maximum use of natural light while creating a sense of space within the terminal – all this achieved despite T2 having exactly the same footprint as T1. Working closely with Pascall+Watson, OMK supplied 4,000 Trax MKII seats for Terminal 2. Divided into three storeys, the 75,000sqm facility also boasts a total of 58 check-in desks and 18 airline desks, allowing T2 to process up to 15 million
passengers per year. Aer Lingus, meanwhile, has installed 21 self-service kiosks on the check-in fl oor and six kiosks in the T2 car park building. Passengers spending any time in the terminal can experience DAA’s
carefully thought out retail and concessions offering, the Loop, which, as the name suggests, consists of almost 40 shops spread over 9,000sqm, with high street stores like Monsoon, Claire’s and Tie Rack, to restaurants, beauty salons and souvenir shops stretching around the terminal’s contours. While only 30 fl ights are currently operating a day from T2, DAA is
busy looking for new tenants to fi ll up its 19 short-haul or 8 long-haul gates. As a further enticement, DAA introduced a new route incentive scheme in January, giving carriers a 100% reduction in ‘qualifying’ charges on long-haul services for the fi rst year of their operation. A transfer incentive scheme is also in place offering all airlines selling
through fares on through tickets on specifi c routes a set of discounts to encourage the development of a more stable route network. These efforts could soon bear fruit as DAA continues talks with Air
India in the hope of convincing the fl ag carrier to move its European base from Frankfurt to Dublin. “Air India is already looking at Dublin as a future hub, fl ying from the
east and transferring in Dublin for forward journeys into Europe or North America, T2 gives us fl exibility and potentially, airlines could be enticed from China and elsewhere in Asia,” enthuses Furlong. So what about the future? Plans for a third terminal remain muted and
will no doubt be a long way off given that the precarious nature of Ireland’s fi nances, while DAA will not be awarded government subsidies for a new approximately 3,600 metre runway until passenger traffi c reaches pre-2008 recession levels. While major European hubs such as Heathrow face capacity and
expansion limits, Dublin is now well prepared and hopefully well placed to come into its own.
AIRPORT WORLD/FEBRUARY-MARCH 2011 AW 27
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