Prague Airport Buys Five More Passport Desks, and Three Shops Come Out to Fit Them

The arrivals border control in Terminal 1 at Prague airport is being enlarged, and the work has a contractor, a price and a start date. Zdopravy.cz reported on 4 September, citing the public contracts register, that a consortium of BAK stavební společnost and PULSKLIMA has won the job. The airport will pay CZK 259.8 million excluding VAT for the construction work; total costs of the investment are to reach up to CZK 290 million, the remainder covering design and engineering, technical supervision for the client and health-and-safety coordination.

The problem being bought out is a familiar one: queues tens of metres long across Terminal 1 in the morning peak, when several long-haul arrivals from outside the Schengen area land in quick succession.

Arrivals in Terminal 1 currently have twelve conventional counters and nine automated gates. Per an earlier airport statement, five conventional counters and four self-service EasyGoGate gates are being added, taking the hall to seventeen counters and thirteen automatic gates. The new gates are supplied and installed by the Police of the Czech Republic, not by the airport.

The Entry/Exit System made an old queue worse

The airport told Zdopravy.cz that the need to raise the capacity of the control showed itself more clearly after the European Entry/Exit System came in last October. EES records the entries and exits of third-country nationals across the Schengen external border — a per-passenger biometric transaction where a passport stamp used to do. The stated aim of the building work is to raise throughput at operational peaks and shorten waiting times.

The project is not only about desks. It also enlarges the space in which passengers wait ahead of border control, and completely modernises the ventilation and air handling at passport control.

Finding that space costs the terminal three of its retail units.

In connection with the expansion of the passport control, three retail units along the perimeter wall will also be removed, in order to improve movement past it.

— Denisa Hejtmánková, spokesperson, Letiště Praha

The documentation, according to Zdopravy.cz, specifically counts on dismantling the Costa Coffee, Food Lovers and Relay outlets.

Building it around the passengers

Work starts in the first half of September and will be done with Terminal 1 in full operation, including at night. Demolition, noisy and dusty activities and anything requiring technology to be switched off are to run mainly between 22:00 and 05:00. Completion is set for the end of April next year, which puts the finish just ahead of the summer season rather than into it.

Passengers will not get through the eight months untouched. In one phase, three of the existing passport counters will be temporarily closed; the airport says it has scheduled that stage for a period of weaker traffic with a lower share of passengers from outside Schengen. In the remaining phases the restrictions are to be local only.

Read against the rest of the airport's programme, this is a small, unglamorous investment that touches more arriving passengers than most of the larger ones will. The bottleneck it addresses sits in an existing building, is caused by a regulatory change rather than by growth in traffic, and gets fixed by five desks, four gates, a bigger waiting area and better air — at a quarter of a billion crowns, and at the price of the coffee shop by the wall.