Airport Stores In Dogfight

by Judith Rosen -- Publishers Weekly, 3/21/2005

Much like airlines fighting over routes and flight slots, two high-flying airport bookstore operators are jockeying for sites.

Borders Group, which landed at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport in 2002 and has a store in Concourse B, has made what the airport business manager described as "a very competitive proposal" for the Hudson Bookseller lease in Concourse C, which comes up for renewal this spring.

Borders has some 14 airport bookstores and plans to open four more this year, two of them in the next few months. The newest store opened March 14 at Boston's Logan Airport, the company's third there. New stores are planned at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in early May. The stores, which are operated under the Borders name, are run by the company's Waldenbooks division, which opened its first airport store in 1997. "We're very interested in continuing to expand the number of airport locations we have as opportunities present themselves," spokesperson Anne Roman told PW.

For its part, Hudson Group's Hudson Bookseller stores, with more than 50 airport stores, will open two stores on May 1 at Pittsburgh International Airport, which has been hard hit because of the troubles at US Airways.

The Pittsburgh stores will be Hudson's first airport outlets since June 2004, when it opened a store in Seattle. "We're aggressively growing our Bookseller brand," senior v-p of business development Michael Mullaney commented. And although Mullaney insisted that Hudson is in the transportation business for the "long haul," Borders is providing the company with unexpectedly stiff competition.