Apr 23, 2025

ABJ’s Sean Hemmersmeier reports on ULI Austin’s April Breakfast:

Don’t expect construction at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to slow down anytime soon.

Although ABIA is undergoing a $4 billion effort to add a new terminal and update other major features of the airport’s layout, officials anticipate more work will be required not long after the current expansion project wraps up in 2030.

The current project is aimed at accommodating more than 30 million passengers annually and should allow ABIA to meet travel demand up to the year 2040, said Shane Harbinson, chief development officer for ABIA, during an Urban Land Institute Austin panel discussion April 23 at the Austin Central Library.

The current phase of expansion will add a new terminal with at least 20 new gates — possibly 30 depending on airline demand.

But Harbinson said ABIA has a master plan to add even more gates and terminals down the line. He said the additional capacity could be added because the current ABIA expansion is being built according to a “hub friendly” design, in which the new terminal will be parallel to the existing one and connected by a tunnel to make it easier for more airplanes to fly in and out.

“If you notice it’s a parallel concourse design … and following that theme we can go up to about 75 to 80 million passengers a year,” he said. That’s almost as much as the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport today, although it seems Austin’s plan is to mimic the layout of Atlanta’s massive airport.

Harbinson said officials are already thinking about building more parallel concourses next to the one about to spring from the drawing board. He rattled off concepts like “concourse B, C, D, E and F. That positions us very well to grow. We have to be disciplined enough to follow that plan, and the infrastructure we are doing today is setting up the table for that development plan.”

In 2024, ABIA served about 21.7 million passengers, slightly below its record of 22.1 million passengers the year before. In either case, the traffic has far exceeded the airport’s original expected capacity of 11 million passengers when it opened in 1999.

Harbinson said there always will be construction work needed for the airport to keep up with rising travel demand and to remain competitive with other airports.

“The airport is a construction site that lands planes,” he said. “We’re always under construction.”

Still, expanding an airport is an expensive proposition and has to be done in phases to make it affordable for Austin to pursue, said Dennis Waley, a managing director of PFM Advisors, who spoke during the ULI panel. PFM Advisors works with municipalities on financial planning.

The continued expansion of ABIA beyond 2030 will help Austin compete with larger markets and continue to grow its business community, said Jeremy Martin, the president and CEO of the Austin Chamber of Commerce.

“When you look at where Austin is going to be in the next five, 10, 20 years, it is those global destinations, global hubs that are served by multiple large airlines,” Martin said during the ULI panel. “We have to be thinking in terms of concourses, terminals B, C, D, E and just keep working at it.”

Martin also views the growth of ABIA as important for the region’s business community.

“Air service is a key priority for especially headquartered companies, as they are trying to connect with their operations across the globe,” he said. “If we don’t have good connection then we are not even considered. … As airlines have invested in Atlanta, Salt Lake, Denver, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, you also see similar growth in their economies.”

Ongoing negotiations between the airport and its primary airlines on a new comprehensive financial agreement is another key part of the ongoing expansion that will help determine the size of the new terminal. Harbinson said an outline of the agreement is expected to be sent to airline executives in June, with the goal of getting a deal finalized by the end of 2025.

An ABIA spokesperson said that timeline is tentative, and “we’re working hard to get it to the finish line as fast as we can without sacrificing quality and consensus for speed.”

ULI Members can login to Knowledge Finder to view the breakfast video.