An airport restaurant has a problem no high-street restaurant has: nobody came for the food.
They came because the gate hasn’t opened. They have between eleven minutes and two hours, they don’t know which, and they are carrying more than they can comfortably put down. Every design decision you make either helps them settle or quietly pushes them back out into the concourse to eat a sandwich standing up.
We’ve fitted out F&B and lounge spaces at Muscat International, and the same lessons keep surfacing. Here’s what actually determines whether a traveller sits — and stays.
Design for the clock, not the cover
In a city restaurant, you design around a two-hour dwell and a booking. In an airport, dwell time is imposed from outside and it is wildly uneven. On any given lunchtime you’re serving someone with eight minutes and someone with ninety, at adjacent tables.
That means one seating type will always fail somebody. The layouts that work carry three distinct zones:
- Perch and go — counter or high-top seating near the threshold, no service ceremony, visible to someone deciding in three seconds whether to enter.
- Sit and wait — standard four-tops and two-tops in the middle band, the bulk of your covers.
- Settle in — banquette or lounge seating at the back, deeper, softer, with the flight information display in eyeline so nobody has to keep standing up to check.
Get the ratio wrong and the space reads as the wrong kind of place. Too many high-tops and it feels like a cafeteria; too many soft seats and your morning rush queues past empty banquettes.
Flow beats furniture, every time
The single biggest determinant of whether an airport F&B unit performs is what happens in the first two metres past the lease line.
Travellers approach at speed, in the concourse’s directional current, usually with a trolley or a spinner case. If the decision point — menu, counter, host, whatever it is — sits too deep, they’ve walked past before they’ve read it. If it sits too shallow, the people reading it block the people entering, and the queue spills into the concourse, which your airport operator will not thank you for.
Practical rules we work to:
- Keep a clear entry apron of at least 1.8 m before the first fixed element. It looks like wasted commercial area on the plan. It isn’t.
- Set primary circulation at 1.2 m minimum, and 1.5 m where trolleys will travel. A 900 mm aisle works beautifully on a drawing and fails on day one against a cabin bag.
- Never let the till queue and the exit path cross. If they do, you’ve built a permanent bottleneck that no amount of staffing will solve.
- Put the till where staff can see the door. Perceived wait is a function of being noticed, not of minutes elapsed.
The seating density conversation
Every operator asks for more covers. Our job is to say where the curve turns.
More covers only make money if people sit in them. Push tables past a certain density in an airport and three things happen: the luggage has nowhere to go, so it lives in the aisle; servers slow down because they’re navigating instead of serving; and travellers self-select out because sitting means asking a stranger to move.
The number we protect is not the cover count — it’s the usable footprint per seated traveller, which in an airport must include a bag. Roughly 0.4 m² of stowage per seated guest, either under a bench, beside a banquette, or in a designed recess. Design it in and you recover aisle width. Ignore it and you lose the aisle anyway, just messily.
Where we buy density back:
- Banquettes against the perimeter. Fixed seating recovers 15–20% over loose chairs on the same run, and gives you concealed bag stowage underneath.
- Rectangular tables that can be pushed together, rather than round ones that can’t.
- Bar-front seating that faces a view or a window rather than a wall — solo travellers, who are most of the airport, will accept a much tighter shoulder-to-shoulder condition when they aren’t facing another person.
Power is not an amenity
It’s infrastructure, and it drives seat selection more than upholstery does. Watch any departures hall: people don’t pick the nicest chair, they pick the chair near the socket.
Specify power at 70–80% of seats minimum, at table height or in the banquette rail — never on a floor box a traveller has to crawl under a table to reach. USB-C at 30 W or better; a 5 W USB-A port in 2026 is worse than nothing, because it promises a charge it can’t deliver and generates complaints. Where the ceiling and coordination allow, keep the power route inside the joinery rather than the floor slab — airside slab penetrations are a permit conversation you want to have once, not twice.
Atmosphere is mostly acoustics and light
Airport concourses are loud, reverberant, and lit to a uniform brightness for wayfinding and security. An F&B unit that matches that condition is invisible. One that contrasts with it reads as sanctuary from ten metres away — and that contrast is the whole marketing budget.
- Acoustics: the goal isn’t silence, it’s separation. Soft-fit ceiling rafts or perforated acoustic panels above the seated zone, upholstered vertical surfaces at the perimeter, and anything at all on the back wall. Bringing reverberation time under roughly 0.8 seconds in the seated zone is the difference between a space you can hold a conversation in and one you flee.
- Light: drop the level and lower the source. Concourses run high and flat. Pendants and table-adjacent light at 2700–3000 K, layered against a darker ceiling plane, will pull people in from a lit concourse without a single sign. Keep the counter and menu boards bright — that’s the wayfinding — and let the seating fall away.
Materials earn their place over eighteen hours a day
Airport F&B doesn’t close. There is no quiet Monday, no seasonal refit window, and any works you do later happen between 01:00 and 04:00 under airside escort.
So the material logic inverts. You specify not for the photograph but for the fourth year:
- Table tops in compact laminate or engineered stone, not veneer. Rolling cases hit table edges constantly.
- Chair legs and banquette bases in metal with a proper coating, and a defined kick strip. Timber legs at an airport last about eleven months.
- Flooring with a slip rating that holds when wet, because it will be wet, and a joint layout that survives trolley wheels.
- Upholstery at 100,000+ Martindale, in a colourway that hides what airport upholstery accumulates, with removable and replaceable seat pads. Replaceable is the word that matters — a banquette you can re-pad in a night shift has a fifteen-year life; one you can’t has a five-year life.
The measure that matters
The client brief usually arrives as a cover count and a budget. The number that decides whether the unit succeeds is dwell — how long a traveller stays, and therefore whether they order a second thing.
Everything above is in service of that one metric. Flow gets them through the door. Density and stowage let them put their bag down. Power decides which seat. Acoustics and light decide whether they relax. Materials decide whether it still works in year four.
Get those right and you don’t need to persuade anyone to sit down. They’ll do it because it’s the most comfortable moment in their journey — and in an airport, that’s a low bar and an enormous opportunity.