Official airport partner: President & CEO Royal Schiphol Group on 6 billion EUR investment and sustainability ambitions

This year, World Aviation Festival has partnered with the Royal Schiphol Group as our Official Airport Partner. At the event, Pieter van Oord, President & CEO, Royal Schiphol Group will be discussing the vision, opportunities, and challenges ahead for Schiphol airport and joining a panel looking at operational efficiency alongside Paul Griffiths, Debora Flint, and Christina Cassotis. 

Ahead of the event, Pieter van Oord joined for a brief interview unpacking the 6 billion investment plan to improve Schiphol, sustainability opportunities, and the upcoming World Aviation Festival. Read the full transcript below. 

To join us at World Aviation Festival, book your ticket here!

 

It’s not been that long since you stepped into your role as President & CEO of Royal Schiphol Group. So as the new leader what is your personal vision for the airport’s future and how do you see it evolving under your leadership?

Well first of all, obviously the importance of Schiphol Airport for the Netherlands is huge. It provides us with connectivity to the rest of the world and for the Netherlands that is extremely important as I would say we are one of the most international countries in the world. We have a huge trade balance with import and export, we have numerous people traveling all over the world so for us, a well operated Schiphol Airport is instrumental in the DNA of what the Netherlands is.

There are quite some challenges to work on and I will name three. First of all, there is a challenge to find a better balance between Schiphol and its environment. That is about noise, it’s about emissions and is also about our employees so we need to find a better balance there.

What we have experienced particularly after the covid years is that we lost that balance a little bit and we are working now together with the team very hard to get back in a good balance and we do that by providing fair working conditions for our employees.

We do that by daily contact with our with our neighbours on issues like emissions and noise and we do also do that by building up good relationships with our customers, the airlines. The relationship between Schiphol and its airlines is instrumental in the success of the airport. So that’s one element, balance with our stakeholders.

The second one is improving our operations. There is a lot to do on our operations. We have experienced during the last years that we did not invest sufficiently in maintenance and repair and we have an extremely ambitious investment program now to invest in asset management and improving this. We are breaking here with the past. In the past we did not invest as much as we are going to invest during the next five years on our assets.

And the last element in what I am going to look at with more interest than ever before we would to be a good asset manager. We are going to invest at Schiphol Airport approximately 1 billion euros per year and to do that you need to be a good asset manager. There are certainly some lessons to learn there from projects in the past and there is an ambitious investment program for the future, so we need to be to be a good investment manager. Those are the three priorities I have.

 

Fantastic. You mentioned this 1 billion euro per year investment, and you’ve already spoken about environment, operations, stakeholder relationships etc. are these the key areas that you’re prioritising when it comes to this investment, or are there any others? And how do these align with your broader strategy overall?

Well, what I think we’re going to do is we are going to do a few big projects. We’re building new piers. Everybody knows that we are working very hard on finalising the A pier and when we have finalised it, we will also replace the C pier. The C pier is our oldest pier, it’s more than 50 years old and what we’re actually going to do is demolish it and build a new C pier in order to have the infrastructure which is required for these modern times.

Another major investment which we are going to do has to do with our baggage handling. We are going to build an entire new baggage handling area at Schiphol so we can build spare capacity baggage handling which makes it possible for us to replace older baggage handling systems which we have running now which need to be replaced.

Another major investment which we are going to do has to do with sustainability. Schiphol would like to be a leader with respect to being a zero emission airport for scope one and scope two and we are working very hard start on electrifying our airside area and have already made big steps there. So we’re doing major investments in power units for the airplanes, the carriers when they visit us, we’re also working on electrifying the fresh air units and we’re actually also electrifying our total heating at the airport. So our ambition is that we will not be using gas in the near future and that our total operation at the airport will be will be electrified. To do that we need to also invest major sums of money.

 

And picking up on this sort of environmental theme, the Netherlands has very publicly been at the centre of political discussions around sustainability and the industry. How are you navigating the balance between this and your mission to connect the world?

Well, we’re all subscribing to the Paris Agreement and we would like to be, as a country, Net Zero in 2050. But our ambition as an airport is to be Net Zero even in 2030. There’s always a tension between the budget you have and the ambition you have. I would say that tension is there in any other country also.

I think if you look at the Netherlands, we have certainly the ambition to be at the forefront of this, we would like to be a leader with respect to sustainability and we’d like to be an example for other airports in the world. We do many innovative things with respect to sustainability, so I really think that we have that ambition. There is a price with it but we have certainly the commitment to do that and it would be nice if we could invite other international airports and show them what sort of initiatives we have already undertaken with respect to sustainability.

 

Absolutely, so really take a leading role in the field. Turning our minds to October now why did you decide to partner with the World Aviation Festival and how does this collaboration benefit the wider industry?

Well, like in any other industry you would always like to have an exchange of ideas with others in order to become more competitive and learn from others. In that sense this event this is an opportunity to meet others and show what we are doing, but also pick their brains on what they are doing. Learning from other airports is in our DNA. We would like to be a learning organisation and in that sense, we’re very happy that the festival is in Amsterdam.

 

Great, well thank you so much for sharing your insights with me today and I look forward to seeing your sessions in October.

It was a pleasure to do and I’m looking forward meeting you.

 

 

To hear from our other partners also see:

• Official charity partner: Empowering children across KLM destinations with Wings of Support
• Official alliance partner: CEO of SkyTeam on tech and collaboration
• From cost centre to value hub: Transforming airline operations with Bob Tulleken, KLM