Johann Peries flies regularly between Sri Lanka and London. On his past four trips, he has skipped 12-hour nonstop flights in favor of a 15-hour trip with a connection here at brand new Hamad International Airport. The Qatar Airways business-class lounge is too good to fly over, he says.
“I like the break. I like the airport. I like the lounge,” says Mr. Peries, who directs a hair and beauty salon company in Sri Lanka called The Cutting Station. “You don’t feel claustrophobic, even when it’s crowded in the morning,” he says.
Competition among airlines is increasingly waged on the ground, especially in the Persian Gulf, where fast-growing airlines have been driving construction of airports that are creating new expectations for travelers. They are following a strategy pioneered by Singapore and other Asian hubs, where the airport becomes part of the fun of the trip, rather than just an entry and exit.
The hope is to drive economic development by drawing traffic. Business travelers may spend hours at airports to eat, work, meet, sleep and even shower. For vacationers, the airport is an adventure—in shopping, relaxing and posing for pictures with landmark installations.
Emirates has built a cavernous terminal at Dubai International Airport capable of loading two dozen 500-passenger A380 superjumbo planes simultaneously. Before they board, they can buy a bottle of Domaine de Joy Vintage Armagnac, a French brandy, for $6,027. One-year-old Concourse A features high-end lounges that run the length of the building. But by 2020 it will go dark: Dubai has already built a new airport, and has grand plans to construct a giant new terminal there with capacity for as many as 200 million passengers a year, about five times the size of Chicago O’Hare.
Just 81 miles away, Abu Dhabi opened a new terminal for its home carrier, Etihad Airways, in 2009 and is already constructing a giant new facility that will open in 2017.
And here in Qatar, Hamad International opened April 30 to replace Doha International Airport at a cost of $16 billion, more than twice the cost of Denver International Airport in today’s dollars.
There’s a 25-meter-long swimming pool suspended over a concourse, a health spa and ceilings paneled with eucalyptus wood. Then there’s the 23-foot-tall, 20-ton bronze Urs Fischer sculpture of a yellow teddy bear with a lamp that once stood in front of New York’s Seagram Building.
Small touches like travertine stone counters and backlit onyx walls give it a boutique hotel look.
There’s a giant dinosaur robot to entertain children (and adults) and enclosed areas with beds to keep sleepy travelers from slumping and sprawling in corridors. Activity areas offer TV nooks, children’s toys and freely available Apple computers. Shopping ranges from Armani to Hermès to Tiffany.
“I want to make sure everything is what I know people would like,” says Qatar Airways Chief Executive Akbar Al Baker while walking through the airport.
He manages both the airline and the airport, dictating architectural details and furniture design. He regularly inspects his creation, zipping around the airport in a golf cart. He summons workers when he finds smudges on marble surfaces. He dishes out laser stares to employees for transgressions such as letting a customer drape a sport coat over a chair instead of being offered a valet stand to hang up the jacket.
Qatar’s business-class lounge has a reflecting pool with water droplets popping up randomly to create ripples. All seats there have tablet computers. The leather is so soft that travelers aren’t allowed to drop luggage on it. There’s both a sit-down restaurant with menu service and marble buffets stocked with items like salmon falafel, shrimp croquettes and lamb chops. The lounge can accommodate 2,800 people at a time in its department-store-size 12,000 square meters.
The airport was built to handle 30 million people a year. That’s about the capacity of the airports of Seattle or Minneapolis. Qatar will reach that number this year. The planned expansion soon will add capacity for another 20 million.
The airport features high-tech security, customs and immigration equipment, including facial recognition and iris scanning. If a luggage scan produces something suspicious, a radio-frequency chip is attached to the bag so that it triggers an alarm when a passenger leaves baggage claim with it, alerting customs agents.
The spa offers showers, massages, facials and a Jacuzzi. You can purchase a bathing suit for $19 or have a 30-minute massage for $52. Unlimited squash play is $16 and the club gives you shoes and rackets (and has a sanitizing system to clean them).
Carl Barnett, who lives in Dubai, works for a U.S. helicopter company and is originally from England, says the lounges offered by the Gulf airlines have prompted him to switch his allegiance from British Airways and U.S. carriers.
“Compared to these lounges, lounges in the U.S. are rubbish, trash. This is class-plus,” he says. He arrives early to eat, drink and work in lounges. “Of course, it’s not a fair fight. They’ve got money behind them.”
Emirates’ Terminal 3 in Dubai reflects the city itself—brasher and busier than its regional neighbors. It was the largest airport building when it opened in 2008. Concourse A is almost 1 kilometer long—its oval-shaped roof makes it look like a giant loaf of ciabatta bread.
Gates and seating areas sit on the outer flanks of the rectangular building, with duty-free stores running the entire length of a walkway down the middle. (There are surprisingly few restaurants by U.S. airport standards. American outlets like Shake Shack are the most popular, airport officials say.)
The concourse can fit a 500-passenger A380 superjumbo at each of its 20 gates. Regular gate areas feed the lower passenger level. First- and business-class passengers board on the upper level without mingling with the hoi polloi.
The first-class lounge houses a cigar lounge with plush leather seats, burgundy walls and a bronze ceiling; separate men’s and women’s mosques; and an elevator to bring up VIPs from cars driven straight to the terminal.
“There are more and more VIPs every day,” says Mazen Adla,Emirates’ senior airport services agent for lounges in Dubai.
The first-class lounge offers free haircuts, free 15-minute massages and free shoe shines. (Those run about $5 in business class.) Rolex clocks with gold leaf adorn the walls, and flowers flown in from abroad change every seven to eight hours. First- and business-class lounges run the length of the terminal, so you can leave a champagne glass in the lounge, walk a short distance to board and be seated quickly with a new glass of the same vintage.
“When it began, it was a tiny refueling stop with a compacted sand runway,” says airport spokesman Zaigham Ali. In the past eight years, traffic has more than doubled.
Last year, Dubai had 66.4 million passengers pass through the airport, nearing its capacity of 75 million people a year. A new concourse is already under construction to raise capacity to 100 million a year by 2020. Then a move to new facilities to be constructed at nearby Dubai World Central airport, already used for cargo flights, will lift capacity toward 200 million a year, Mr. Ali says.