In the proverbial war to win the hearts and minds of travelers, battles are won or lost in the trenches where checked bags move between flyers, airline agents, aircraft and back.
Recognizing the importance of keeping this critical process easy and efficient, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) recently invested nearly $64 million to provide its customers an improved experience at the baggage claim areas of its busy Terminal 1.
When the dust settled last autumn, MSP had upgraded 11 carousels and their surrounding environs with more floor space and raised ceilings. It also enlisted help from a small army of loons and regional song birds, just for fun. (Yes, you read that correctly.) New audio and visual effects let visitors know they are in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. And behind-the-scenes improvements enable more accurate baggage delivery, ease movement between levels and provide cleaner, more efficient airflow.
 facts&figures
Project: Baggage Claim Expansion & Modernization Location: Minneapolis–St. Paul Int’l Airport Owner/Operator: Metropolitan Airports Commission Project Cost: $63.8 million Funding: Passenger facility charges; general airport revenue bonds; airport-generated revenue Key Components: 11 larger baggage carousels; improved baggage handling systems; expanded waiting areas for travelers & meeter/greeters; new airflow system Timeline: New carousels came online from Dec. 2019 – Sept. 2024; behind-the-scenes work will continue through late 2025 Design: Alliiance Contractor: Morcon Construction Baggage Carousel Manufacturer: Mechanica Sistemi Ceilings: Armstrong Ceiling Tiles |
“You have to really experience it yourself to get the look and feel of it,” says Bridget Rief, vice president of Planning and Development for the Metropolitan Airports Commission, which owns and operates MSP. “It’s lighter, it’s brighter and more comfortable. It feels brand new in a building that is nowhere near new.”
A Welcome Problem
Business is brisk at Minnesota’s primary commercial airport, which regularly serves travelers from across the state and as far away as northern Iowa, western Wisconsin and both of the Dakotas. A Delta Air Lines hub with close to 20 active air carriers, MSP set an annual record in 2019 with nearly 39.6 million passengers and has steadily moved closer to eclipsing that figure since COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions lifted in mid-2021.
The airport served 34.7 million passengers in 2023, followed by 7.5% growth in enplanements through October 2024 Its all-time high was 39.5 million annual passengers in 2019.
Alan Howell, senior architect with the Metropolitan Airports Commission, notes that even though MSP’s customer experience has not suffered amid increasing traffic, leadership recognized years ago that there were still opportunities to improve Terminal 1’s five interconnected buildings.
In 2008, MSP began a formal examination of its infrastructure needs for 2020 to 2040. The resulting Environmental Assessment published in 2013 revealed shortcomings in several areas, including the ticketing lobby, checkpoint lanes and curbsides. It also found that baggage carousels in Terminal 1 had roughly half as much presentation length (space for bags) as needed. In fact, some carousels had not been expanded since they were installed decades earlier.
As planners began to plot solutions to those challenges, Howell had the team focus on “inspansion,” a twist on the work “expansion” coined by David Tomber, a longtime aviation planner of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA). Inspansion became an informal code for the planners guiding MSP’s push to create a new terminal experience without building a new terminal. As Howell puts it, the challenge was to make a building that was constructed in 1962 last another 50 years.
And with that, MSP’s multiyear, $525 million Operational Improvements Program was born. It set a new pathway for reducing congestion, increasing capacity and optimizing passenger flow—all to improve the customer experience—and included $63.8 million in improvements to baggage handling systems.
Among the team’s first tasks was creating more floor space. By adding a 15-foot bump-out along the terminal’s 930-foot-long roadway frontage, designers were able to relocate stairways and remove six escalators and four elevators to better open areas along the backside of baggage claim. Overhead ductwork and conveyors were relocated to raise ceilings by 24 inches while adding much-needed natural lighting.
Next, the older 20-foot-radius circular carousels were removed and replaced with rectangular units that are 50 feet long and 30 feet wide. What amounted to a mere 10% increase in floorspace enabled MSP to significantly reorient the carousels in a way that produced 50% more presentation space for travelers to see and claim their checked bags.
The new carousels came online in phases, the first in December 2019 and last in September 2024. Some behind-the-scenes work will continue through late 2025.
Project Manager Jeff Loeschen explains that the path forward began with removing a central escalator bank that was long viewed as untouchable—until it became obvious it was one of the most restrictive points in the terminal.
“[Relocated] vertical circulation became transformative in terms of how we move people through the building”, says Loeschen, who has worked with MSP for 15 years as a managing principal at the design firm Alliiance.
Concessions and restrooms were centralized to improve previously underutilized spaces. An emphasis on small details made movement and flow more intuitive, Reif adds.
“The ability to know you can take the stairs whenever you want helps relieve congestion near the escalators,” she explains. “The stairs were there before but hidden from view. Putting them next to escalators was just one little, nuanced thing that made it feel like a better experience.”
Designers retained carpeting in meeter/greeter areas for comfort, but changed most flooring to terrazzo for durability and ease of cleaning. Close to 70% of MSP passengers begin or end their trips there, so adding new meet and greet space was deemed to be a very important goal.
Angela Enroth, senior project manager with the Metropolitan Airports Commission, highlights that the upgraded baggage handling system in Terminal 1 uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags and laser readers to help move bags in the proper direction. Out back on the ramp, a digital notification system tells airline tug drivers on which carousels to unload bags. If a driver makes a mistake when offloading, the system automatically reads the RFID tags and changes public-facing notifications to inform travelers their bags were placed on a different carousel. The technology also tracks bag arrival times to help airlines better monitor their performance and more quickly locate misplaced bags, Enroth adds.
She is likewise proud of a modified displacement ventilation system that uses ductwork hidden by the carousels to push cooler air upward from along the floor perimeter. As body heat from building occupants warms the air, it rises and the system pulls it back into returns placed above the centers of the carousels.
“This allows us to have a lot better indoor air quality and saves on energy costs,” Enroth explains.
If It Quacks Like a Duck
Recent upgrades weren’t limited to infrastructure improvements. The airport’s project team also monitored customer movement patterns and behaviors to determine how to best engineer the designs for walking areas, restrooms, kiosks and carousel queues.
“We wondered how in the world could we combat people’s existing attitudes about wanting to pick up bags amid the congestion we’d seen,” Howell says.
A new meet and greet area was added close to Baggage Claim.
Because some passengers tend to crowd around the spaces where bags first appear, designers shifted that process to the side of the carousels. This forces those who want to be first claiming their bags to reposition themselves versus requiring extra effort from those who are willing to wait for their bags to make their way around. Some carousels run clockwise, others counterclockwise, which further enables the baggage flow to function most efficiently around travelers’ different tendencies, adds Howell.
And then there are the loons and other birds.
For safety purposes, airports the world over use a combination of visible and audible cues to inform people whenever a baggage carousel is about to begin moving. But MSP opted to be more creative. Instead of humdrum alarms, it curated an inventory of local bird sounds to alert passengers when their bags will soon appear. The airport supplemented a mix of its own homemade stereo recordings with others from Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab.
“We’re on a huge flyway on the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers for birds migrating north and south—along with a lot of snowbirds in the state who’ll use airplanes,” Howell adds wryly. The local nature sounds are designed to foster a sense of place for those just arriving in Minnesota.
As the recorded birds chirp, coordinated light displays replicate how sunlight reflects off the water in local lakes, creating an effect that is much more pleasant than the former “hockey arena-style” sirens that once blared in baggage claim areas. Multiple bird sounds were tested, but those from Canada geese were not used because some airline stakeholders said their honking sounded like the carousels were broken.
The visual centerpiece of the reimagined space is a 29-foot-high glass and metal sculpture that extends through an oval-shaped opening between the ticketing and baggage claim levels. Known as The Aurora, it features 1,900 hand-blown glass bulbs and approximately 6,000 LED lights that alter their color palettes to reflect different seasons and weather conditions.
Created by internationally renowned artist Jen Lewin, The Aurora was installed in fall 2020. The Brooklyn-based artist, with family ties to Minnesota, spent the next few months programming its lights to adjust their colors and patterns to coincide with input from a live weather data feed. (Click here for more information about The Aurora as first publishing in our March/April 2021 issue.)
The bottom tail of “The Aurora” is visible from the arrivals level. The rest of the sculpture extends up through a hole in the ceiling to the departures level.
The sound and lights can also be adjusted to tie into special events. For instance, the airport sees a surge in travelers every June as fans of Prince, the late Minneapolis-born musician, fly in to commemorate The Purple One’s birthday at Paisley Park, his longtime home that is now a museum. Someday, MSP might seek a licensing agreement to play Prince’s music in lieu of bird sounds during that busy period, Howell suggests.
Similarly, sounds from sporting events could potentially be used the next time Minneapolis hosts the Super Bowl or an NCAA Final Four basketball championship.
“These [baggage carousels] are industrial machines, so they do require notification when they’re starting up. But there is not a written requirement of what that notification is,” says Howell, adding that airport safety and operational teams reviewed the current bird-sound alert sequences to ensure code compliance.
Linking the airport to its surrounding natural setting is hardly a new concept at MSP. Terminal 1’s primary building—originally named in honor of aviator Charles Lindbergh—was designed by LeighFisher and the hometown firm Cerny & Associates in the late 1950s. They used a style that suggested the structure was hovering above the prairies that surrounded the airfield at that time.
The jet age architecture included a distinctive concrete folded-plate roof form that over time became a source of local pride, even though the building was too small for present-day demands, says Ashley Ilvonen, another Alliiance principal and senior terminal designer for architecture.
“We work on a lot of terminals that were built in this vintage—1960s, 1970s—that are now undersized,” Ilvonen says. “As we evolve the spaces I like to ask, ‘Have we done this building justice?’ So as we developed MSP’s new façade, it does not visually touch the existing folded plate to respect the original design while still achieving our desired goals.”
April Meyer, who oversaw the recent interior design, says that MSP’s location on a bluff above the rivers influenced aesthetics inside the building, as well, from flooring colors to artwork and lighting.
“The starting point of the vision was where sky meets water and water meets bluff,” says Meyer, an Alliiance principal and senior terminal designer.
A Regional Asset, Source of Acclaim
MSP is a critical regional economic driver that impacts not only the Twin Cities but also the smaller suburbs of Bloomington, Eagan, Mendota Heights and Richfield. The Metropolitan Airports Commission, an 81-year-old public corporation with 14 members appointed by Minnesota’s governor, collectively represents eight regions near MSP and has six nearby general aviation facilities within its purview.
A 2016 economic impact study revealed the system supports 87,000 jobs and $15.9 billion in annual business revenue. MSP alone has a sizable impact and also brings invaluable recognition to the region. Last year alone, it received three high-profile honors: best North American airport in a global passenger survey by Airports Council International; top airport in the United States by readers of Travel + Leisure magazine; and first among airports with more than 33 million annual passengers in the annual J.D. Power North America Airport Satisfaction Study.
MSP’s rise to prominence has been assisted by a pair of hometown companies and longtime partners: Alliiance and Morcon Construction.
Alliiance is a planning, architecture and interior design firm that has been involved with various terminal improvements since 1978, including recent design work for the Operational Improvements Program.
Eric Peterson doubles as company president and the principal leader of its Aviation Group. He cut his professional teeth on an MSP project more than 35 years ago and says the airport’s latest evolution represents an inflection point from past to future.
“MSP evolved, kind of piecemeal over time, and each little step wasn’t a breaking point,” Peterson explains. “But to keep doing that over decades and decades, at a certain point there are only so many incremental moves you can make to solve what problems you’ve got right now. This project was that much-needed reset.”
Materials, finishes and other design elements incorporated in the lengthy Terminal 1 modernization will carry over to future improvements, beginning with upcoming work on Concourse G, he adds.
Morcon Construction, the airport’s other key local partner, is headquartered in Fridley, just north of the Twin Cities. It has consistently worked as a general contractor at MSP for more than four decades. For this project, the company was tasked with expanding the baggage claim footprint and upgrading the baggage handling system and carousels. Vice President Joe Montgomery notes that Morcon enjoys the challenges of working in an airport environment.
“You work all night and there’s a high, crazy risk that something may not operate as it should, come 4 o’clock in the morning. And if you made a mistake, it would be on the news,” Montgomery muses. “You’ve got to have a little bit of excitement, otherwise I’d be bored and wouldn’t do it.”
This time around, the adrenaline surge stemmed from challenges associated with working at a site that itself was working around the clock.
“It’s all planning to determine how you can install equipment in places where equipment exists and yet keep the airport functioning,” Montgomery explains. “If the bag belt system doesn’t run, the airport doesn’t run.”
To achieve its goals, Morcon installed many temporary systems, including up to 7,000 linear feet of baggage belts that were later removed and recycled. Teams worked nights and other odd schedules to avoid disrupting airport operations occurring “inside the same little box,” he says.
Some of the removed carousels were built by Rapistan Systems in the 1960s, so the new replacement units from Mechanica Sistemi of Italy are notable upgrades.
“Those carousels are highly engineered Italian Ferraris,” says Montgomery, praising their durability and ease of maintenance in particular.
Removing overhead conveyors and relocating ductwork required extensive coordination, but the results were transformative, says Jim Hayes, a Morcon superintendent.
“Before, you came down the escalators and it was dark with very low ceilings. Now, you come into baggage claim and its wide open, bright and enjoyable,” he remarks.
Looking back, Rief recalls some nervousness when telling the airport’s then CEO about her desire to disrupt the airport’s appearance and operations for a multiyear renovation. Breaking down each phase into smaller, more manageable jobs—all offset with constant communication—kept things manageable and less disruptive to users, she notes.
Once the first set of revamped carousels was unveiled, Rief knew the temporary pain would all be worthwhile in the end.
“People could see we were really creating spaces that looked just like all those pretty pictures we had drawn all those years ago,” she says. “The visual improvements alone would make this worthwhile, without the efficiencies and customer improvements that came with the projects.”
Adds Ilvonen: “This is not just a people-processor. It’s a stressful environment the passengers are going through, so how do you make this an enjoyable experience?
“MSP represents Minnesota as a gateway,” he continues. “It should reflect the people, the culture and the great outdoor environment. That’s something the airport tries to sprinkle into the overall flavor of it—that this is about Minnesota.”
