- January 29, 2025
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With Patrick’s, Anna Maria Oyster Bar and Peet’s Coffee located in the new Concourse A, Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport provides passengers an upgraded culinary experience as they await their departures.
That’s great, but what about Concourse B where, for decades, the food and beverage offerings could be described as pedestrian at best?
By the end of the year, all that will change as SRQ is in the midst of wholesale upgrades aimed at bringing a variety of local favorites and new flavors. New vendors in Concourse B will be Mattison’s restaurant, a Motorworks Brewing bar, a renovated Starbucks, a Wahlburgers restaurant and Salty Key Bar.
The Jimmy John’s sandwich shop, which SRQ President and CEO Rick Piccolo confirms, is the highest-grossing location in the country, will remain.
All the work is scheduled to be completed, in phases, by the next high season. It can’t happen all at once, Piccolo said, as prudence dictates a graduated approach in order to maintain a level of service that the flying public demands.
“There will be some inconvenience for passengers for a while as areas get closed off, get redone and then reopen,” Piccolo said. “The goal though, is at the end you'll have a lot more choices, a lot more variety, and we'll be able to serve our customers much better because we realized, as we grew so fast, we just didn't have enough concessions and people are waiting in line and taking a long time.”
Taking a tour of Concourse B from the security checkpoint, already completed is Seaside Market, a grab-and-go space that replaces the CNBC Shop, where buildout is underway for Mattison’s. That is expected to be completed in about 18 weeks. Across from Seaside Market is a temporary bar in the center of the concourse, which will be replaced by Motorworks between gates B4 and B6.
Continuing down the concourse, the Starbucks location is boarded up while it is renovated, and for now has moved to a kiosk in the center walkway nearby. Next to Starbucks, the new Wahlburgers will replace what is now the Tap and Pour restaurant and bar. Across the walkway, Huey Magoo’s Chicken will replace the Kona Bar. Finally, at the end of the concourse where gates B9-B14 are located, will be the Salty Key bar, replacing the Dunkin’ kiosk and a grab-and-go kiosk.
Some of the new establishments will encroach on space currently used for gate seating, but Piccolo said with a million annual passengers now using Concourse A, which is fully leased by Allegiant Air, it will ease crowding in the gate areas. And besides, with the new bars and restaurants, there will be some better places to sit and wait for boarding.
“All of this will be done over the next six or seven months,” Piccolo said. “By the time we get to the heavy season of next winter, this should all be in place, functioning very well, and people will have a lot more choices, a lot more convenience, and that should make things much better for our passengers.”
By 2026, Piccolo said, SRQ anticipates surpassing 5 million passengers, having served just more than four million in 2024. Gate seats lost to the new additions will be eventually be regained by “bump-outs,” which will expand the gate areas.
Changes are also coming to the main terminal area. The Dewar’s Clubhouse restaurant and bar has been downsized, and work on a new Suncoast Bar in a portion of that space. The remainder of that area wrapping around the fountain will be reconfigured into smaller shops.
Because the current airport facilities were built prior to the installation of TSA checkpoints, the prior location of the larger restaurant space, most recently the Dewar’s Clubhouse, to placed at the terminal at the time when passengers were permitted to move freely between the gate and terminal areas.
“It's oversized pre-security and undersized post-security, because when the terminal was built, that security stuff didn't exist,” Piccolo said. “That's part of what we need to correct, to make it smaller pre-security, because there's not that level of demand there, and more robust post-security, because that's where the demand is.”
The total investment in the changes in Concourse B and the main terminal will be $15 million to $16 million, but not at the expense of the airport. Those costs are borne by the master concessionaires, who bid for the right to do business at the airport. They take all the financial risks, contract with the restaurants, bars and retailers, and pay the airport a negotiated portion of the revenues.
Host Marriott was the previous master concessionaire serving the airport, that contract recently expiring. The Sarasota-Manatee Airport Authority selected two new concessionaires, SSP America and Paradies Lagardére, to operate there for the next dozen years.
“It just so happened that as we are going through this massive expansion, the contracts with our master concessionaires were expiring, so we put out a request for proposals for new agreements,” Piccolo said. “The reason we go to master concessionaires is then we have one entity to deal with, and in this case, we have two. If there's an issue, we only deal with the master concessionaire, not with every little entity, so it's much more efficient for us from that standpoint.”
The caveat, Piccolo added, was that the new concessionaires focus on bringing in local purveyors of food and drink rather than offering the generic operations typical of the past.
“We wanted to be sure to bring some local businesses with recognizable names for our customers to enjoy, and then maybe they will go visit them while they are staying here,” he added.