Dublin Airport to invest €73m in customs facility for US market

As of November 2022, Dublin Airport facilitated flights to 14 destinations in North America. File photo

Management at Dublin Airport are set to invest €73m in an expansion of the US Customs Border Protection Facility at Dublin Airport.

The expansion comes to meet the expected increased number and frequency of long-haul routes in the coming years, particularly long-haul routes to America, and the airport operator said it wants the work to progress with “minimum disruption” to passengers at Dublin Airport.

As of November 2022, Dublin Airport facilitated flights to 14 destinations in North America. Its transatlantic traffic has grown 153% since 2010 and the daa touts Dublin as the fifth-largest gateway between Europe and North America.

“It is expected over the course of the next regulatory period for there to be continued and increasing pressure on US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processing infrastructure to deliver the level of customer experience and processing times the airport aspires to meet,” daa said.

It expects to submit a planning application for this new expansion at the airport by the end of March 2023, with full regulatory planning approval to be granted no later than the third quarter of 2024.

It said it doesn’t expect to award the contract for construction of the new two-storey building until January 2025, with a start date for works to begin in March 2025 and completion in November 2027.

The expected 32-month process to complete the works is due to plans to carry it out on a phased basis to ensure no disruption to operations at the airport.

The daa is now in its initial stages of recruiting a main building contractor to design, procure, construct, test and commission, and put into service the new expansion.

It added: “Daa wants to engage with an experienced building contractor with the necessary contracting experience and capacity to undertake the works in compliance with industry health, safety, quality, sustainability, and environmental best practice.

“Project success will be the delivery of the project on time, demonstrable value for money, within budget, accident-free, to the required standard of quality and with minimum disruption to customers and the operation of Dublin Airport.” 

The move comes as the daa announced a 231% increase in the number of people travelling through Dublin Airport in 2022 as pandemic restrictions eased internationally. The 28.1 million people who travelled through Dublin Airport last year is 85% of 2019 levels.

However, the airport was beset with difficulties during the early summer period with huge security queues becoming a feature of travel through Dublin for many weeks.

Passengers were told to arrive earlier for flights in the face of these delays, and measures put in place to ease congestion have since been eased as more normal security times have returned.

“The recovery in passenger numbers from March onwards was way beyond the expectations of even the most optimistic of travel forecasters," daa CEO Kenny Jacobs said.