Dublin Airport, Commercial Strategy
Dublin, Ireland

Lounge strategy for Ireland’s principal international gateway

Service

Commercial Strategy & Advisory

Sector

Aviation

Client

Dublin Airport

Size

36.4 mppa

Solution

Dublin Airport is Ireland’s largest airport, serving over 36 million passengers a year and operating four common use lounges across its terminals. The airport launched a capital investment programme to expand capacity in line with projected passenger growth, including a review and redevelopment of its common use lounge estate. Lounge utilisation has been growing significantly, driven both by greater passenger awareness of lounge access and by expanded access routes through priority pass and credit card schemes. Benoy’s Commercial Strategy & Advisory team (formerly Pragma) was commissioned by Dublin Airport to assess the space requirements for its common use lounges, based on current and future passenger profile and global lounge trends.

Passenger profile, trading data and a space supportable model

The work covered an evaluation of the current passenger profile and lounge behaviour to identify key lounge users and their requirements; a review of the existing lounge offer across space, trading data, access modes and commercial layout; and an assessment of lounge provision against peer and competitor airports globally. Industry trends and global best practice were synthesised into a set of implications for Dublin Airport. A bespoke interactive space supportable model was built to size the commercial and operational potential of the lounges, broken down by high-level space segmentation.

A model that supports future planning

The outputs of the model and the wider analysis support Dublin Airport’s lounge planning within the broader capital programme, with the space supportable framework giving the operator an in-house capability for continued lounge sizing and configuration decisions as passenger demand grows.