The flying squad
The catering team at Manchester Airport's Terminal One is waiting with bated breath. It has just been informed that a charter flight due to take more than 200 people on holiday has been delayed for five hours. The passengers are due to descend on the catering outlets, food and drink vouchers in hand, any minute.
This situation can arise with little or no notice. An emergency landing, fog in a far-off country, a plane with a technical fault at Heathrow or 50 passengers held up on the motorway - you name it and it can have an impact on Manchester Airport.
This is why Select Service Partner (SSP), the airport catering arm of Compass, which operates fast-food outlets such as Burger King, Pizza Hut and Harry Ramsden's, the Donkey Stone pub and the upmarket Lancaster Brasserie, has to work closely with all the airlines.
Plane delays
"You can't work in isolation in an environment like this. There are too many people and too many things going on," says Richard Nieto, deputy managing director for SSP in the UK.
When a plane is delayed, the catering manager actually gets about 30 minutes' notice. Each airline has a station manager, who informs the catering manager, who can then pass on the information to his staff. Otherwise, passenger lists and flight patterns are checked on a regular basis and it's a question of continuous communication with each other.
"I would expect whoever is running the business at 5am to start to get a feel for what is going on," says Nieto.
It also means having flexible staff who can adapt to whatever job needs to be done. At Manchester, SSP has a base of managers allocated to whichever outlet needs them. Everyone who joins the company, including office staff, has to do six months' training, which involves working in one of the outlets so they know exactly what it's like. After that, everyone does a couple of days a year to remind them. Staff are also cross-skilled so they can turn their hand to working the tills, serving behind the bar or waiting at tables.
But the difficulty comes in trying to deliver the same service and standards to 10, 60 or 200 people. And although every member of a family will be looking for something different, SSP is striving to cater for every individual taste.
When the airport authority decided to redevelop the land-side retail and catering space in Terminal One 18 months ago, SSP was given the opportunity to introduce some new concepts such as the Donkey Stone, a pub with a traditional Manchester feel, with brick walls and wooden tables and chairs all designed to give international passengers a taste of the local area.
"You can sit down and not think you're in an airport but in your local pub. We're trying to get away from building outlets on concourses," says Nieto.
Another new venture for SSP, to add to the old favourites of Harry Ramsden's, Burger King and Pizza Hut, is the Lancaster Brasserie.
This is a full-service, à la carte restaurant, aimed at business passengers. SSP opened this after research carried out on 10,000 passengers every quarter, combined with airport authority research, showed a market for it not only from business travellers but also from within the local community.
The brasserie, which overlooks the runway, has been open for four months and is working well. Open from 6am to 10pm for breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner, passengers eat freshly prepared food such as a starter of warm marinated vegetables with field greens tossed in sweet garlic, priced £5.50, or lemon sole fillet with creamed celeriac and wild mushroom ragoñt (£13.25).
So far, 70% of the restaurant's customers are passengers, but the idea of attracting the local community is working too.
Valentine's Day saw the brasserie full with local people. It fell on a Saturday this year, so there were no domestic shuttle flights, but normally the staff would have to estimate how many passengers the restaurant might attract and, based on this, make a decision on how many outside customers they can take.
"We make a calculation based on the knowledge of the specific day, and it's a skill. We could lose business because of it, but that's the risk we take," says Nieto.
Something for everyone
Although the Lancaster Brasserie is taking airport catering up a notch, SSP is not forgetting its other customers. A new area called the Meridian foodcourt houses all the traditional fast-food outlets mentioned above, as well as a halal offering called Mumtaz, which provides Kashmiri food, and Caffä Ritazza, a Compass brand.
SSP has also taken into consideration stress factors such as the volume of people, the queues, the delays, and fear of flying. Professor Cary Cooper of the University of Manchester's Institute of Science and Technology, says: "Caterers can adapt when they see these situations going on, such as ensuring people don't have to queue and serving relaxing food such as herbal teas instead of ordinary teas and coffees which are stimulants."
SSP has created some simple initiatives such as pads of colouring sheets and crayons for children. In addition, all the outlets are together but spaced out in one long avenue with more than 500 seats, many of which look out over the runway.
Once through passport control there is another opportunity for SSP to get travellers to part with a few pounds. The company estimates that 50% of people wait until they get to this stage to relax and have a drink, so it is now in the process of refurbishing the air-side catering service with a Sports Bar and the Verandah foodcourt, which includes more of the established brands.
