This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by psa188@juno.com. What You Might See in the Airport November 19, 2002 By JOE SHARKEY SALT LAKE CITY - Forget, for a moment, the prospect that airports this holiday season may reflect all of the grim ambience of a New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles waiting room, as the crowds grow, the carry-on bags pile up and the authorities impose the most strict luggage-inspection regime in the history of commercial travel. Look, instead, on the bright side. Spread across the sprawling exhibition floor at the annual trade show here last week of the Airports Council International-North America were strong indications that companies that sell products and services to airports are feeling optimistic. With business travelers, their main customers, spending more time than ever hanging around airports, there is a whiff of renewed opportunity in the world of airport commerce. Terminal lockers, for one, appear to be making a comeback. After the 2001 terror attacks, the government shut down all rental lockers in secure areas of airport terminals. But Smarte Carte Inc., which operated thousands of lockers in about 50 airports, has redesigned and reopened about 185 of them in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, in a pilot project that is sanctioned by federal security officials. The company expects to expand the project soon to other airports, assuming the airports and the authorities agree that it is working adequately in Minneapolis. There is a catch, however. To stash and retrieve that laptop or cumbersome carry-on that you don't want to lug around an airport in the hour or two you spend killing time, you'll need to be fingerprinted. Ed Rudis, the chief executive of Smarte Carte, which also supplies those dispenser racks that rent 85,000 baggage carts in 200 airports, was happy to oblige as he showed off a bank of the new lockers. He pressed a fingertip on a touch-screen scanner; a gizmo gurgled electronically and the locker door swung open. "You have to get the electronic fingerprint scan to open it and put something in, and then the same scan when you come back to open it and remove the contents," Mr. Rudis said. "Whoever rents the locker has to be the same person who retrieves the contents." The lockers rent for $2 for the first hour and $8 for 24 hours. The biometric technology was designed to address the main security concerns that caused the lockers to be shut down last year: the possibility that an airport worker who does not need to pass through checkpoint metal detectors could stash a weapon or other banned item in a locker for an evildoer accomplice holding an airplane ticket to retrieve. A few hundred feet away, Eric Siskind, the business-development director of Central Carts, seemed glad to know that Smarte Carte was spending so much time on lockers. With airport parking lot revenues expected to be down about 6.8 percent this year, according to the airports council, Central Carts was created last month as a division of the Central Parking Corporation, which runs 3,900 parking operations at airports and other places in the United States and abroad. Mr. Siskind said his company intended to challenge Smarte Carte's dominance in airport baggage-cart rentals. "When you have a competitor like that with such a strong hold in the market, there's less reason for them to innovate," said Mr. Siskind, whose company has concessions to operate 3,300 baggage carts at the St. Louis and Phoenix airports. The plan is to market German-made carts with advanced braking capabilities and custom designs to accommodate golf bags, skis and other bulky cargo, he said. "We want to show that there are needs beyond the standard cold pieces of steel you see today" at cart-rental concessions, he said. It is not just the practical business of carting and storing suitcases that vendors are salivating over. Boutique breweries, nail parlors with massage booths, and food-court restaurants all had displays of products aimed at sopping up some of the extra time that travelers are spending walking around airports. Even the floor underfoot was seen as a business opportunity. Ads on Floors a Northern Ireland company, showed off plush terminal carpeting with elegantly designed advertising logos woven in that it promoted as providing "the ability to incorporate pure branding into the floor." With so many new things to sell, the marketers themselves are a market. And sure enough, half a dozen companies had booths promoting new easy-to-spot and easy-to-read electronic signs for conveying everything from flight and security information to the blue-plate special at a terminal restaurant. "You get everything except Smell-o-Vision," said Randy W. Russell, a North America sales manager for Richardson Electronics, who was showing off a bank of wide plasma screens and liquid crystal display monitors showing food products from various airport restaurants with movie-screen clarity. "It's no longer just a still photograph that's been up there seven days a week for the last six months," Mr. Russell said. "Now, it's custom-tailored to a specific time of the day, to a specific feature item that they want to move on the menu. In the morning, maybe it's steaming biscuits and gravy, and in the afternoon, it's fried chicken that you're really seeing there dripping with juice and steam, and you know it's real." The commercial enthusiasm here even went outside the terminal area to the literal foundation of the airport, the runway. In a speech to about 200 airport executives and more than 1,000 vendors and others, Marion C. Blakey, the recently appointed administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, reiterated the government's determination to support airport expansion projects, including new runways. A major runway expansion can cost billions of dollars and take up to 20 years because of community opposition. Critics of airport expansion insist that federal aviation planning is predicated on inflated estimates of future passenger demand. In her speech, Ms. Blakey noted that President Bush had issued an executive order to streamline the permit process for runways and other major transportation projects. Next year, she said, four new runways are scheduled to open at airports in Denver; Houston; Miami; and Orlando, Fla. Within five years, eight more new runways are expected to be in service at various airports, she said, adding, "A mile of highway gets you one mile; a mile of runway gets you anywhere." Back in the exhibition hall, Roger Sandberg was presiding at the display booth of the National Asphalt Pavement Association, where he is vice president for technology and market development. Framed by stacks of brochures about the history, uses and wonders of asphalt, which along with concrete is a major component of runways, Mr. Sandberg passed out souvenirs - orange, fist-size foam replicas of asphalt construction drums imprinted with the words "Beat Construction Stress, Use Asphalt!" Talk of building new runways, Mr. Sandberg said, was music to his ears. "I'm one of those guys, I see fresh asphalt and I'm in heaven," he said. "I love the smell of hot asphalt." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/business/19BUZZ.html?ex=1038723012&ei=1&en=fbd28b9ebb0578fb HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company