The first flight to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol landed in 1916. Today, the airport serves 120 airlines flying to 301 direct destinations—among the most nonstop routes offered by any global airport, making it the second-best-connected airport in Europe. In 2024, Schiphol was the world’s 17th busiest airport, processing nearly 70 million passengers, of whom about 36 percent were making connecting flights. The airport has been making efforts to update its infrastructure, including its new Pier A, an expansion of Schiphol’s main terminal. The addition, which will provide eight new aircraft gates, is currently under construction and is expected to open in 2027.
Robert Carsouw is the chief financial officer of Royal Schiphol Group, which also operates airports in the Dutch cities of Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Maastricht, and Lelystad. Carsouw, a McKinsey alumnus who joined Schiphol in 2021, recently spoke with McKinsey’s Steve Saxon about the challenge of renewing a century-old airport, the promise of data-powered automation, and the importance of investing in improvements to the fundamental passenger experience. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Making an old airport new again
Steve Saxon: What are some of the challenges that Schiphol Airport faces today?
Robert Carsouw: Schiphol was founded at this location more than a century ago. We are the oldest airport in the world still operating at its original location. We need to rebuild our infrastructure, expand it, renew it, and electrify it to become more sustainable, because our old infrastructure is reaching the end of its technical lifetime.
Today, per square meter, we are the most crowded airport in Europe. We just lack space. The last expansion was done in 2005. We are building new spaces now, but anyone who has done construction knows that brownfield construction is much more difficult than greenfield construction.
In the first two decades of this century, our focus was on finding growth without adding costs. And we did grow, from roughly 40 million passengers to about 70 million passengers today. But we didn’t always invest or maintain our assets very well. And what we found in 2022, after COVID-19, when passengers started coming back, was that Schiphol had collapsed. We were among the worst-performing airports in the world. The airport was broken in some ways, which became painfully visible from the long waiting lines in our departure halls in 2023.
That was our wake-up call and a turning point. For a long time, there was too little attention paid to employees and their working conditions, and unfortunately, this also applied to the quality of our infrastructure. We have fundamentally changed that since then, and we are well on our way to improving the quality of our airport.
In the past few years, we’ve focused on rebuilding the airport—both from an infrastructure perspective and an organizational perspective. We outsourced a lot of operational processes in the past, but we’re now back to managing our own security and passenger flows. We’re also redeveloping our commercial propositions. We need to improve the passenger experience.
We’re investing more than a billion euros per year for the next decade and beyond. The airport will have a very different look and feel in the future compared to today.
The future of airports: Seamless, automated, and personalized
Future-proofing construction
Steve Saxon: As you develop your new Pier A, how are you future-proofing it so that it will still be relevant in 30 or 40 years?
Robert Carsouw: In general, one of the core capabilities of any airport needs to be master planning. There’s uncertainty about the future. How are you going to invest in infrastructure so that it fits in most scenarios going forward?
Specifically with Pier A, we decided that it needs to have very flexible infrastructure, with gates that can be deployed in different configurations to handle up to 11 aircraft simultaneously. The building will let us divide passengers who have different security screening requirements—depending on where they’re arriving from—onto three separate floors. It is fantastic architecture, with very large spaces and lots of light. It will be open in 2027, and it will provide additional capacity but also a terrific passenger experience and increased commercial revenue.
Our oldest pier, Pier C, is from the 1960s. It’s really worn out. Once Pier A opens, we will close, demolish, and rebuild Pier C. And that will eventually become a much wider and more modern pier compared to the current building.
Preparing for more passengers on bigger planes
Steve Saxon: Projections suggest continued strong future growth for global aircraft traffic. Meanwhile, aircraft types are always evolving. How do you approach accommodating increased aircraft traffic and new types of aircraft while also thinking about your responsibilities to other stakeholders, such as the communities around you?
Robert Carsouw: There is a big debate around Schiphol’s maximum capacity. Growth in the number of flights helps bring in more passengers, but it can also affect our neighbors by creating more noise.
We are expecting that the number of flights at Schiphol will stabilize at around 480,000 per year, but the number of passengers will grow faster—from 70 million to 85 million in the coming years. We expect that to happen because of airlines’ fleet renewal, which will bring in more passengers per plane. Airlines will fly with less noisy, less polluting, but larger planes.
The expected “upgauging” of fleets to larger planes can create challenges for the airport, because it has been built for planes of a certain size. If the new airplanes are larger than the old airplanes, that means our gates will be too small, and our bridges won’t fit anymore. So when it comes to developing new piers and new infrastructure, we take into account the increased size of the airplanes.
That said, the demand from the airlines grows faster than we are able to rebuild the airport. That means that at this point in time, we still have some disconnected handling of planes—delivering passengers on buses rather than through a connected gate. That’s not the service we would like to offer. We want our passengers to have a more connected experience. But we foresee that in the next decade or even two decades, we will still need bus operations to make those transitions happen.
Steve Saxon: You mentioned that one challenge you deal with is crowding. Can new technologies, such as AI or biometric technology, help to smooth passenger flows?
Robert Carsouw: I like to believe that Schiphol is a leader on that front. We’re forced to be, because we’re short on space. We need to make sure we use every square meter of the airport very carefully.
One example of what we’re doing is using AI to optimize the turnaround of planes. We have a camera system that analyzes 70 unique turnaround events within 30 turnaround processes, and we share that data with the airlines so they can improve on-time performance. Our image-based processing system can detect impending delays in advance and help us make informed decisions to act on them. We cannot afford to have planes stay longer at gates than planned.
Another thing we’re doing is monitoring passenger flows on an individual-passenger level so we can see, in real time, where passengers are—while respecting their privacy, obviously—and make sure that we direct flows to parts of the airport that can support passengers without overcrowding them.
Smoothing cargo flows
Steve Saxon: Schiphol is a key cargo hub for the region. As e-commerce continues to boost cargo volumes, what steps can airports take to cater to this future growth?
Robert Carsouw: We expect that cargo will continue to grow on the back of e-commerce. But in general, the Netherlands is a country of trading. Our imports and exports are huge compared to our GDP, so it’s very important for us to get it right. For our hub carrier, KLM, their economic model very much depends on filling their aircraft bellies with cargo.
Schiphol is a very strong cargo hub in large part because all the systems and procedures around cargo have been streamlined together with customs in the Netherlands. We have a well-integrated system where cargo arriving can go through the border quickly and with very limited administrative effort. This reduces costs, reduces complexity, and improves speed, which is very important in e-commerce. In terms of infrastructure, we have built a huge new cargo building that is highly automated and super efficient for all kinds of cargo.
We believe there is further opportunity to automate and simplify processes so that physical flows are not hindered by administrative flows. Making sure that the belly capacity under passenger planes can be fully utilized for cargo requires collaboration with our carriers, including data sharing and establishing joint objectives. So we’re working with them on exchanging insights to make sure that that whole process—from outside the airport, through the warehouses, inside the aircraft belly, and back—will run even more smoothly than it does today.
Bridging from the past to the future
Steve Saxon: What are some key things you can learn from looking at lessons from the past?
Robert Carsouw: If you compare an airport from 30 years ago with the airport of today, in many ways the fundamentals haven’t changed.
People want to have a predictable process. They want to get through security. They want to get a nice cup of coffee. They want to have clean toilets. And they want to board their planes on time without stress. That’s still the objective. But it’s not always easy to get that right.
I think at Schiphol and at other airports, there’s been a rediscovery that developing and operating an airport in the right way is a complex and difficult project that requires careful attention and investment, master planning, asset development, and asset management. Maintaining assets that have been developed over a period of decades, with many different technologies that are all mission critical, requires lots of expertise, lots of data, and lots of specific skills that often can’t be outsourced. We’re focused on regaining expertise and taking back control of our airport, and we’re making big progress.
Even cleaning toilets sounds very mundane, but it’s essential for the passenger experience. A dirty toilet is hugely dissatisfying for a passenger. What we learned at Schiphol is that we went too far in asking other parties to take care of things like that. We have to take ownership.
Steve Saxon: If you had to put on your futurist hat, what are some of your predictions about what could change? And what actions are you taking today to secure the future of the airport?
Robert Carsouw: When it comes to processes, what many airports, including Schiphol, are working on is to have passengers simply walk through the airport without needing to pass through all the gates and the checks. That could be done using biometrics and automatic gates, and it would make flows much more natural and smoother. For passengers, it would be a less stressful and much happier experience.
I would expect that a lot of operations will be robotized and automated in the future. The concept of an autonomous airport that runs like a machine is something that we’re moving toward. We’re collecting more data in an effort to further automate airport operations. There are thousands and thousands of sensors and cameras in our buildings. That culminates in massive data pools that we’re analyzing and using to steer the airport. We already have autonomous wheelchairs for passengers with reduced mobility, who can sit in the wheelchair and be autonomously driven through the airport. I’m sure in many different areas, that kind of automation will continue to develop.
In the future, technology will be more important. And passenger behavior could be different. But, as I say, the fundamentals will stay the same. Even in 20 years, the essence of what the airport is doing will not change.
