Terminal Shopping : In Toronto, a New International Airline Facility Offers the Mad Delights of an Upscale Mall

A six-foot-tall teddy bear doorman beckons you to Harrods of London as he guards the store’s terra-cotta exterior with its crisp, moss-green awnings. Inside, atop a $54,000 carpet flown in from London, you’ll find “Masterpiece Theatre”-style accouterments traditionally favored by persnickety Britons: Victorian jewelry, lead soldiers, antique golf clubs, dainty tea-time biscuits, classic haberdashery and croquet sets designed for use on the office carpet. The doorman himself can be taken home for about $3,800.

A few steps away is Caviar House, where you can pick up foie gras to go, among more than 3,000 exotic possibilities. Smoked bison pastrami. Strawberry honey. And, of course, both Iranian and Russian caviar.

Next door is an outpost of the SoapBerry Shop chain, providing a dizzying array of fragrant bath, body and aromatherapy products ranging from private-label mud to beeswax mascara, said to be a must for those crippled by sensitive eyelashes.

As you stroll through the more than 80 upscale shops and restaurants here--some with suede walls or giant T-shirts suspended from the ceiling--it might be any of a number of the world’s monuments to high-end consumption. You could be in the newest “court” of Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza. Perhaps another floor opening up in Los Angeles’ cavernous Beverly Center. Or the latest right-side-of-the-tracks shopping mecca anywhere in the world.

In fact, you haven’t touched down in a traditional mall or outdoor shopping plaza at all. You’ve landed at an airport, Pearson International in Mississauga, 25 miles southwest of downtown Toronto. To be more precise, you’re at Trillium, Canada’s first privately financed and operated international air terminal, which opened in February to the delight of both locals and interna tional visitors.

A massive complex, Trillium’s architectural highlight is its Grand Hall, where pristine airline check-in counters are bathed in natural light emanating from a huge skylight. Most of the shops are around the corner, before you get to the metal detectors, winding along an aisle reminiscent of a generic shopping center.

Named for the official flower of the province of Ontario and also known as Terminal 3, Trillium houses a store where travelers can rent a cellular phone or a portable fax machine during their stays. It has a crafts emporium doing brisk business in $700 rice-paper lamps that resemble Royal Canadian Mounties riding zebras. And the usual shops providing electronic gadgets, books, designer sunglasses, silk neckties, Disney toys and more. A 494-room, luxury Swissotel opened in July and is attached to the Grand Hall by an enclosed walkway.

Along with 14 fast-food stands such as A&W;, Manchu Wok and Cookies By George (the Mrs. Fields of Canada), there are 14 cafes and bars in Trillium, among them a trattoria , an oyster bar and Uncle Sam’s, serving well-loved American sandwiches.

According to shopkeepers, some of the Toronto area’s most sophisticated residents were so intrigued with Trillium’s stores and restaurants that they began visiting them even before the planes showed up.

Some Toronto residents, such as Kelly Burnett, a human resources consultant, have shopped there repeatedly. “It’s great. We’ve used it three times this year,” she says. “My daughter flew to Brazil and we shopped there when we took her to the airport. And we also bought things when we flew to England and the Northern Territories. It’s a welcome change. Instead of all the garbage--the touristy stuff--there are some really great things there. I picked up two or three items of clothing and some jewelry I never expected to buy.”

Indeed, Trillium’s stores and eating esablishments were designed to woo captive jet-setters from all over the world with both quality and diversity. Experts on airports say the terminal provides the most extensive consumption oppportunities of any in North America.

The sizable profit potential from such a retail venture (and other revenue-generating operations such as display advertising in the terminal) is leading other cities to explore private operation and perhaps private financing of their airport terminals. Los Angeles is among a handful of U.S. cities considering the possibilities, which would no doubt be accompanied by the type of expanded retail opportunities offered at Trillium.

“It’s something that a lot of people are looking seriously at in this country. About a half-dozen cities in the United States--Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Peoria and Indianapolis--are looking at selling their major airports,” says Robert Poole, president of the Santa Monica-based Reason Foundation, a conservative think tank that has long promoted the idea of privately operated, leased or owned airline terminals. “L.A. is probably the furthest along in terms of detailed studies,” Poole says.

Clifton A. Moore, executive director of the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Airports, says that shopping facilities not unlike those at Trillium could appear at LAX in the next few years with or without privatization.

“Toronto has recognized that shops in an airport are a place for a lot of impulse buying,” he observes, noting that the Los Angeles City Council has indicated it wants the city to start profiting from LAX. First reports on how much the city might stand to gain if it sold its airline terminals (or perhaps leased them for 40 or 50 years) are due early in 1992.

“The place where this is going to develop next in the United States is Pittsburgh,” predicts Poole. “They have hired BAA (British Airports Authority), which operates Heathrow and Gatwick airports in England,” two airports that have long offered travelers both quantity and quality shopping experiences, Poole says.

(A handful of U.S. airports--including those in Burbank; Morristown, N.J.; Albany, N.Y., and Atlantic City, N.J.--are already privately operated. But as yet, none offers the extensive shopping opportunities provided at Trillium.)

Since Trillium has been open only 10 months, it’s hard to tell how successful the terminal and its shops will ultimately prove. “With the underlying statement that we opened in 1991, clearly a slow travel year, Trillium has been successful within that framework,” claims Viggo Butler, president of Burbank-based Lockheed Air Terminal, which is responsible for the day-to-day operation of Trillium. Lockheed and its partner, the Toronto-based real estate and development firm of Huang and Danczkay, have leased the ground on which Trillium sits from the Canadian government for 40 years. The terminal itself was developed and is owned by both partners.

Butler maintains that Trillium’s amenities are becoming well enough known that they are influencing the airline choices of passengers traveling through Pearson International. (Airlines now using the terminal include American, Canadian Airlines International, British Airways, KLM, Air France, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, Japan Airlines and Air China.) “When there’s a choice between using an airline in Terminal 3 or one of the other two terminals, passengers are moving into our building because of its attractiveness, because of the shopping and the general amenities,” Butler claims. “For instance, there’s no downtown Toronto equivalent of the Harrods store. And anything that Harrods sells in London can be ordered from the store at Trillium. Business has been picking up going into the Christmas season. Shopping volume and passenger volume are directly related. When more passengers show up, they (shop owners) sell more stuff.”

Such stuff covers a lot of territory. Consider these Trillium tenants:

--President’s Choice, a grocery store where departing passengers can purchase alternatives to in-flight microwaved chicken or food to eat when they reach their destinations. Arrivng passengers are also said to stop there routinely for milk and eggs so they don’t have to stop at a supermarket on the way home. And President’s Choice will deliver their purchases to cars parked at the curb, so that baggage-laden passengers don’t have to carry groceries as well.

--Oh Yes Toronto!, which sells spirited, fancifully designed T-shirts for $18 and is known for some of the classiest souvenirs in the world: sportswear, mugs and other items featuring stylish motifs incorporating the word Toronto .

--CIBC Instant Exchange, which offers automated tellers that serve customers in 10 different languages and will convert 17 different currencies to Canadian dollars (and exchange Canadian dollars for six different currencies as well).

--A branch of The Guild Shop, the chain of craft stores operated by the Ontario Crafts Council. At Trillium’s Guild Shop, Asian travelers often purchase Canadian textiles, and Germans are fond of the artwork by the Inuit Eskimos who live in northern Canada. As one traveler said of The Guild Shop: “It’s the most wonderful 700 square feet of any airport in the world.”

--Beckett’s Executive Class, which provides electronic equipment and replicas of the clock in Trillium’s Grand Hall, a 15-foot metal timepiece in which all the parts are visible and six metal figures turn “the wheels of time.” The shop typically sells two of the smaller, table-top-sized replicas a week at about $485 each.

Trillium’s promoters also like to point out that the terminal was designed with passenger convenience in mind. For instance, its escalators, elevators and stairs are all in the same area so that passengers traveling as a group won’t get lost if some individuals use the escalators but others have to use the elevator or stairs.

There are also several individual unisex restrooms available. That’s so travelers who need to use a lavatory equipped for the handicapped and need assistance can bring a spouse (or person of the opposite sex) into the restrooms with them.

In the future, Lockheed’s Butler expects to see additional innovations in Trillium and other terminals that Lockheed Air Terminal will operate. Along with shops, he foresees more services, particularly information services such as interactive, computer-driven displays that would help passengers learn such things as where gates are located and when flights are due to arrive.

“Any good idea that passengers want that comes along, we’ll buy it,” he insists. “That’s what the private sector brings.” He says the company currently is developing a terminal similar to Trillium in Istanbul, Turkey.

As the Reason Foundation’s Poole explains: “People are starting to realize that air travelers are a very select group of people and they’re virtually a captive audience when they have to be at airports. This represents a tremendous retailing oppportunity that has hardly been tapped before. We’re going to see a lot more of this.”