The busiest season for flying in and out of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) starts in about two weeks. This is when families take advantage of the kids out of school and break away for summer adventures. Those families are adding to the cruise ship passengers who already started making the airport busier back in mid-April.
Anyone flying through SEA this summer can expect to see crowds about equal to what came through during the summer of 2019, according to airport spokesperson Perry Cooper.
And on top of all the extra people that hadn’t been flying since the beginning of the Pandemic, there’s construction and lots of it at the airport.
“If you have to come to this area, give yourself a bit of extra time to navigate the construction,” said Lance Lyttle, the managing director at the airport.
The construction areas can easily be seen when people drive into the airport to drop off or pick up passengers.
But the real work is happening inside, as airport staff and airlines get creative with what they have to work with. There is no way to expand the footprint the airport uses right now, so they are taking every nook and cranny and unused bit of space they can find and transforming it into usable space.
“We have to find space wherever," Lyttle said. "We are one of the most constrained airports in the entire USA."
Right now, that means they are taking the air space that existed between the upper departures drive and lower arrivals area to create a promenade.
Alaska Airlines is turning the very north end of that new promenade into a new ticketing area, to be lined with kiosks to print bag tags.
“This is the single largest construction project ever undertaken by Alaska Airlines,” said Shane Jones, vice president of real estate and business development for the airline.
The price tag for this is more than $500 million. When it’s finished, there will be two levels of ticketing kiosks available for passengers, the promenade, where passengers from light rail or parking will walk directly into, and then the traditional departure level, where passengers come in off the airport drive.
"I got the confirmation from my phone, in an email, and at the kiosk punch your number in right there,” said Ron Ingersoll, who had just checked in for an Alaska Airlines flight to Denver.
"First, we introduce kiosks in the industry, and we're also the first to get rid of them in the industry,” said Shane Jones with Alaska Airlines.
Now the kiosks are replaced with what Jones calls BTS, bag tag stations, designed to cut the time it takes to check in, in half.
“The secret is always having one available to a customer so you’re never waiting on a device,” said Jones.
When the new lobby's complete, he told KOMO News the goal is to get through here in less than five minutes.
This type of streamlining and fast-tracking is needed, with the airport expected pre-pandemic crowds of travelers this summer nearing roughly 52 million, the number that flew through SEA during 2019.
The other areas of the promenade, all the way down to the south end of the airport, will be transformed into office space, moving people and operations from existing offices to free up new space for other projects.
One of those projects includes expanding checkpoint five by relocating offices behind the existing ticket counters to the new promenade. That will give the airport space to add one extra screening lane, with the ability to add a second lane in the future, expanding out to a total of seven screening lanes.
For both Alaska Airlines and SEA, the goal is getting passengers through to their gates as quickly and efficiently as possible.
“This project will be transformational, to the aesthetics, the look, the feel, the efficiency. It will be a totally different level of service,” said Lyttle.
The Transportation Security Administration is another key stepping stone in getting passengers to the gates. TSA spokesperson Lorie Dankers told KOMO News that extra officers on loan from less busy airports, start working on Friday at SEA, so they can expand screening lanes during peak times, Fridays through Mondays.
Lyttle, who's been at the airport for seven years, told KOMO News that the goal is to get SEA a 5-star rating, which he said only one other airport in the U.S. has achieved from Skytrax. Checking the Skytrax website, Houston Hobby is listed as a 5-star regional airport, and LaGuardia Airport has a 5-star terminal (for Terminal B).
“We’re currently at four-star, but it’s gonna take a whole lot, restrooms, dining, lounges, sensory rooms to make it, and we have to do it with a certain level of excellence the big beneficiaries will be our passengers because we have to put all these amenities all of these things in and the passengers will benefit,” said Lyttle.
Lyttle did not share a timeline for achieving that goal, but SEA construction expert Mike Francis said the new Alaska ticketing areas will be done in phases, the first by the end of July and the second by the end of the second quarter in 2024.