Global passenger traffic reached 9.5 billion in 2024, surpassing pre-pandemic levels for the first time, according to Airports Council International. ACI projects a compound annual growth rate of 3.4% through 2043. Airlines are actively looking for markets where demand is reliable and growing, and regional airports across the Southeast are seeing new routes launch, enplanement numbers climb, and pressure on airport leadership build to sustain that growth.
Protecting it is harder when the people responsible for it are spread too thin.
“At a large hub like Hartsfield-Jackson, there are entire departments dedicated to facility maintenance, workforce management, and vendor oversight,” said Patrick Walker, President and CEO of Consolidated Facility Services. “The airport director is not fielding a call because a cleaning crew is short-staffed at Concourse C. At a regional airport, that call goes to the top. The operational weight is different, and the partners you bring in need to understand that.”
The Staffing Problem Is Structural, Not Situational
Regional airports operate with lean administrative teams. When a no-call, no-show happens on a janitorial crew, the ripple reaches leadership faster than it would at a larger facility. There is less organizational depth to absorb it.
Steer Group’s analysis of airport workforce challenges found that airports broadly are short-staffed and struggling with recruitment and retention following years of pandemic-related hiring freezes, compounded by the retirement of experienced personnel. For regional airports, the problem is more acute because there is less redundancy in the system.
CFS owns recruiting, scheduling, and backfill entirely, not the client. With more than 150 employees deployed across three shifts at active airport contracts, CFS brings a staffing infrastructure that a regional airport cannot replicate through in-house management. When a coverage gap opens, CFS closes it without the airport director spending a morning managing it.
“Our clients hire us so they can stop thinking about coverage,” Walker said. “The regional airport director’s job is to build routes, manage airline relationships, and grow the economic footprint of that community. That work cannot happen in the margins of a day that starts with a staffing crisis.”
Facility Performance Is Part of the Airline Pitch
The connection between terminal condition and airline decision-making gets less attention than it deserves. Airlines evaluating a market do not make route decisions in a vacuum. They look at the passenger experience. They look at facilities.
ACI World’s Airport Service Quality program, the leading global airport passenger satisfaction benchmark with more than 400 participating airports in 110 countries, measures satisfaction across dimensions that include cleanliness as a scored category. ACI’s 2025 ASQ findings noted that passengers increasingly value clean, welcoming airport environments, and that satisfaction across airports worldwide continued to rise despite record traffic volumes. For a regional airport courting a new carrier or defending an existing route, a terminal that scores well on cleanliness and facility quality communicates something to airline partners: this airport runs well, and passengers will be taken care of here.
That argument is harder to make when the facility is visibly understaffed or inconsistently serviced, and regional airports carry less margin for that kind of impression than their larger counterparts.
“A regional passenger is often connecting through a major hub,” Walker said. “Their experience in that terminal shapes whether they choose to fly out of that airport again. That feeds directly into load factors, and load factors are what airlines watch.”
The Infrastructure Pressure Is Real
ACI-NA’s 2025-2029 Airport Infrastructure Needs Study estimates that U.S. airports require at least $173.9 billion over the next five years to fund necessary renovation, expansion, and maintenance projects, a 15.1% increase over ACI-NA’s previous projections. The FAA has identified 27 airports currently constrained in runway capacity or at risk of becoming constrained by 2033.
The capital pressure lands differently at regional airports. ACI-NA’s report notes that non-hub airports account for just 3% of all enplanements but still carry $1.6 billion in capital needs annually. These facilities are managing aging infrastructure, growing passenger volume, and active renovation projects with significantly less administrative and operational bandwidth than large hub airports. When a baggage claim renovation or terminal upgrade runs concurrent with daily operations, the coordination burden falls on a small team.
CFS’s single-source model consolidates janitorial services, construction support, and flooring systems under one contract and one accountable relationship. CFS construction support teams coordinate punch-list work, site cleanup, and light carpentry within live, passenger-facing environments while janitorial crews maintain terminal cleanliness throughout. One point of contact. One contract. No coordination gap for the airport to manage internally.
“When you split janitorial and construction between two vendors in the same active terminal, you create a coordination problem that somebody at the airport has to manage,” Walker said. “That person’s time costs something. At a regional airport, that person is usually someone who should be focused on something else entirely.”
The Quality Standard Doesn’t Change with Airport Size
Regional airports are not low-stakes environments. The regulatory requirements, safety standards, and passenger expectations are the same as at any commercial facility in the country. What differs is the operational context.
CFS runs the same quality management infrastructure at regional airport contracts that it uses at Hartsfield-Jackson and Birmingham-Shuttlesworth: Smart Inspect for daily inspections and work order management, shift-level supervisor walkthroughs, unannounced regional manager site visits, and client-accessible dashboards with real-time performance data. Key performance indicators including Quality Success Percentage, on-time work order closure, and complaint volume by area are reviewed with airport leadership at formal meetings.
“We do not operate differently at a regional airport because it is smaller,” Walker said. “The documentation is the same. The inspection frequency is the same. What changes is how closely we work with airport leadership, because at a regional facility the relationship between a services provider and the operations team is more direct. There is less distance between the work and the people it affects.”
What the Growth Window Requires
The FAA’s 2024 Terminal Area Forecast projects that small and non-hub airports will see 1.7% annual enplanement growth through 2050. ACI-NA projects total U.S. enplanements will reach 1.4 billion by 2040 and 1.7 billion by 2050. Regional airports are not the only ones competing for airline attention in that environment, and the ones that maintain documented, consistent facility performance have a measurable advantage in those conversations.
For CFS, regional airports are where the value of a single-source, accountable facility partner is most visible: reduced burden on leadership, a terminal that reflects the airport’s investment in the passenger experience, and enough organizational depth that the airport never has to absorb a staffing failure internally.
“Regional airports are in a real growth moment,” Walker said. “The airports that hold onto it are the ones that keep their leadership focused outward, on routes and relationships, instead of inward on operational problems that a good partner should be handling.”
To learn how CFS supports regional airport operations, visit cfsserv.com or contact the CFS team directly.
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