Prague Airport strips the shops, offices and hotel out of its Terminal 2 Skywalk

Letiště Praha has scaled back the Skywalk, the roughly 550-metre covered walkway meant to link its new multi-storey car parks with Terminal 2. The shops and other commercial space are gone from the design, and the structure will have fewer floors. The change is set out in the tender documentation for a new contract to prepare the revised Skywalk, which Zdopravy.cz reported on 14 October. The airport describes the change as part of reducing investment costs.

That makes it the first visible cut in a modernisation programme whose other parts are still growing.

What the Skywalk was going to be

The design being abandoned was much more than a corridor. Alongside retail and food outlets it was to hold offices, training and meeting rooms, a medical facility and a hotel. Larger restaurants were drawn at both ends, one of them with an outdoor viewing terrace.

That version had gone a long way. According to Zdopravy.cz, documentation for the building permit had already been produced for it — so the airport is paying to redesign something it had already paid to design to permit stage. Zdopravy.cz does not give the value of the new contract or a timetable for it.

The scheme itself goes back to 2018, when the airport held a design competition for the car parks, a public transport and charter coach terminal on their ground floor, the Skywalk, and the "Plaza" — the public space between Terminal 2 and the new garages. First prize went to D3A, according to the project record on praha.camp, the city's planning centre. The sources do not say whether the permit documentation now being reworked was D3A's.

A programme that is still expanding

The Skywalk is one piece of a rebuild of the whole forecourt, which in turn belongs to the airport's larger modernisation. The biggest part of that is the expansion of Terminal 2, which Zdopravy.cz says is reaching the limit of its capacity at peak times: a larger check-in building, a new Pier D and the reconstruction of Pier C and the spaces around it. Expanding the terminals is meant eventually to lift the airport's capacity to 21.2 million passengers a year.

In front of the terminals, the airport this year tendered a new elevated roadway, due for completion in 2031, to take car traffic away from the main pedestrian routes. The planned railway station on the Prague–Kladno line is to open into the same area, with a new underpass linking it to Terminal 1. New parking capacity and further changes to the public space are also in the plans.

Reading it

Taken together, the airport is not cutting what moves passengers — piers, check-in, the road and the rail link stay — but what was meant to earn money and fill a long walk with reasons to stop. The Skywalk survives as what the headline of the Zdopravy.cz report calls it: a connecting corridor rather than a shopping arcade. Whether that is a one-off economy or the first of several will show in the tenders that follow for the larger pieces.