Philips at Dublin Airport (above): Charting a return to regular cruising altitude
(Photo by Jon Enoch)

Bit by bit, people are flying again. At Dublin Airport, travel is down from a record 33 million passengers in 2019 to a forecasted 8 to 9 million in 2021. Still, it’s a start—and travelers in and out of Ireland’s capital soon will have the benefit of a newly constructed runway, the first to be built in Europe in more than 20 years.

As CEO of global airports and travel retail group daa plc, Dalton Philips (MBA 1998) leads operations in Dublin and airports in Cork, Riyadh, Dusseldorf, and Cyprus, as well as duty-free outlets in 14 countries. When COVID-19 took hold, Philips’s focus shifted to immediate concerns: the safety and mental health of daa’s 8,000-odd employees and the organization’s liquidity. “We’re a very high fixed-cost industry, so when revenues tank, you run into issues quickly,” he notes. Philips credits the organization’s CFO with “filling our boots with cash” when it was an available option, which provided additional flexibility as the organization navigated its way out of an unprecedented situation that saw the usual airport hubbub grind to an eerie near-silence.

Difficult as it’s been, Philips is looking for ways to leverage the high levels of communication and collaboration he saw in action at daa during the pandemic’s worst months. “I told our senior leaders, ‘Look, there’s no playbook; you get to write it as you go along.’ It was really interesting work, and I think our team rose to the challenge.”

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