CEO signs new DIA lease
Airport’s troubled terminal project also addressed
Call it a victory lap around the concourse.
United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz visited Denver International Airport on Friday morning to officially sign an amended lease with Mayor Michael Hancock, granting the airline access to 24 more gates. Already DIA’s biggest and busiest carrier, the updated agreement — approved by the City Council on Jan. 21 — gives United rights to 90 gates in total. It’s real estate that will allow the airline to increase flight traffic from 500 departures per day now to 700 by 2025.
“I have a saying that I say all the time. ‘It’s called proof, not promise,’ ” Munoz said at the signing event on Concourse B, the portion of the airport that hosts most of the airline’s gates and its offices. “When we love a city, we love a place to do business with, we prove it to you with this very kind of economic growth that we do.”
Munoz also visited Denver in 2018 to christen United’s updated flight training center in Stapleton, the largest facility of its kind in North America, according to the airline. United employs about 7,000 people in the city.
United has operated out of Denver since the 1930s and had already made the city a hub when DIA opened 25 years ago. Its new lease is being made possible by the airport’s $1.5 billion concourse expansion project. Of the 24 additional gates it is taking on, 12 are new ones being built on Concourse A as part of the expansion. Those won’t be completed until late in 2021, airport officials said, but United is expected to move into an addition on the west end of Concourse B by the end of this year.
DIA was designed to accommodate 50 million passengers per year. In 2018, it hosted 64.5 million. The 39 gates the airport is adding through the concourse expansion project will set it up to serve up to 80 million people annually.
United’s commitment to the airport as a midcontinent hub is “a significant reason our passenger traffic has grown like it has,” airport CEO Kim Day said Friday, and “was part of the motivation for the gate expansion.”
With nonstop flights to Frankfurt, London, Tokyo and, come March, Nassau in the Bahamas, United has also contributed to Denver’s emergence as a “Global City,” Day said.
That development has led to economic growth. Airport officials last month touted a study indicating DIA generated more than $33.5 billion in economic impact in Colorado in 2018 alone.
“Oscar Munoz, we can’t thank you enough,” Hancock said before signing the lease.
United shares DIA with Denverbased Frontier Airlines and fellow budget carrier Southwest Airlines, which is building a $100 million maintenance hangar on the property. Southwest is finalizing its bid to lease an additional 16 gates on Concourse C, officials with that confirmed Friday, a proposal that could be before city leaders before the end of the month. All of those gates would be new construction. Frontier is expected to pursue more gates.
“It’s always competitive, but we’re glad to have these additional gates,” Munoz said Friday.
Munoz has announced that he will step down as United’s CEO in May, starting a year-long period where he will work closely with his successor. The executive lived in Denver for five years when he was working for US West before and, briefly, after that company merged with telecom competitor Qwest. Since he took over as United’s CEO in 2016, the airline’s traffic out of Denver has increased about 22%, Munoz said.
It’s separate from the gate expansion work, but Munoz has been paying attention to the complications and controversy swirling around the renovation project going on in DIA’s main terminal building. After firing its previous contractor, the city has brought in Greeley-based Hensel Phelps to lead the construction. Work on the rebooted project is expected to begin again in March. The project has made the airport more difficult to navigate for travelers.
“Customers, as you might expect, don’t blame the airport, don’t blame the city, they blame us,” Munoz said Friday. “That’s who they’re flying, and they’ll choose someplace else if we make it too difficult.”
“So the ongoing conversations we’re having here are how do we sort of rejigger the plan and get moving forward as soon as possible and what do we need to do to make sure we can assist and help in those designs and, more importantly, how do we put things in place to mitigate the impact on the traveling public,” Munoz said.
The latest terminal design, Munoz said, is better than the one that proceeded it.
“So the ongoing conversations we’re having here are how do we sort of rejigger the plan and get moving forward as soon as possible and what do we need to do to make sure we can assist and help in those designs and, more importantly, how do we put things in place to mitigate the impact on the traveling public.” Oscar Munoz, United Airlines CEO