Business
Larry Berg
By John Burns published Oct 1, 2009
The Vancouver Airport CEO on the 2010 Games, Asian Pacific travel and YVR's "wow factor"
For most of us, the airport is a way station—emplacements of Native art and doughnut franchises flank tearful reunions and, sometimes, endless carousel queues. Larry Berg, president and CEO of the Vancouver International Airport Authority, sees it differently. Berg, a 63-year-old Edmontonian with a master’s in business, worked in energy and mining for 18 years before joining Canada’s second-busiest airport. To him, YVR is a nexus for issues of security, politics, competition, and shopping, with revenue from non-aviation sources like duty-free, car rentals, and parking buttressing bread-and-butter landing and terminal fees. All this becomes exponentially more complicated with the just-opened Canada Line and the looming five-ring circus that is the Olympics.
What impact will the 2010 Games have on the airport? Aside from enhanced security, we’ll have a lot of processes in place to expedite the Olympic family, especially making sure we handle their luggage, which I think will be one of the larger challenges: they’ll have no shortage of skis, toboggans, luge equipment—not your average suitcase. Arrivals will be spread out over a couple of weeks, but departures will be more challenging, because people will tend to depart over a couple of days. We’ll be doing check-in and luggage-handling for many departing Olympians and spectators at the venues, at the athletes’ villages, and at some of the hotels. In this, we’ve been able to learn from our experience with cruise ships: we do onboard check-in at cruise ships when they dock and we handle their luggage and take it out to the airport in advance, so cruisers pretty well go through the airport in an expedited fashion. Overall, we expect to see between 300,000 and 350,000 more passengers through here during the Games than we would otherwise see.
When the world comes, they’ll find the high-speed RAV in place. What else? For arriving passengers coming in who are international, they are very familiar, from European and Asian cities, with taking rapid transit. It’s kind of what they expect: if you go to Hong Kong or Heathrow or Amsterdam, you expect you’ll have a rapid-transit ride downtown. One of the features that’s coming to the airport is enhanced shopping. Retail now accounts for roughly a third of our revenues. You’re going to see some nice new retail offerings. And for the thousands of people who work in the terminals, there’s a built-in market there as well.
Revenue at YVR has been growing over the last decade, peaking at $368 million in 2007. How is it faring in the current recession? As with a lot of businesses, our sales aren’t what they were. We’re budgeting for a reduction of passengers for 2009. We had about 18 million passengers in 2008 and expect those numbers to decrease this year. In that, we’re no different from many airports, better off than some: the B.C. economy is enjoying a more robust environment than the rest of Canada and other countries, thanks partly to the many preparations that are ongoing for 2010 and to some of the big infrastructure spending that we still see going on around us.
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Thanks for sharing us your experience in the airport!!!!!
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