March 5, 2019 - The new Split airport, or the new terminal, will be four times bigger than the previous one, and worth 450 million kuna. To everyone’s excitement, its doors will open just before the tourist season, in June.
Split Airport's assistant director Pero Bilas revealed the details of the new building at the beginning in February, which is currently the most significant investment in Dalmatia after the Pelješac Bridge. The new terminal will spread across an enormous 36,000 square meters and feature the most modern airport infrastructure. In short, the new terminal will feature 30 check-in counters, 6 exits, 5 luggage carousels, a new sorting facility, parking for 900 cars, a station for 49 buses, and an air-conditioned pedestrian bridge that connects it all.
Split photographer Goran Leš took his lens inside the new terminal to show us where the construction lies today. You can read his story on Dalmacija Danas.
To give you an idea of the new terminal's layout, the main hall boasts a radius of almost fifty meters. From the hall, passengers will have a view of one-on-one check-in counters, a collection of catering facilities, and the observation deck on the upper floor.
According to the idea of the architect Ivo Vulić, above the passengers is a dome with a wooden structure and, by its complexity, can be regarded as a sculpture.
Although spacious, the new Split terminal will be very compact and logical, and from the observation deck, passengers will be able to view takeoffs and landings.
The passenger experience at the ’new’ airport will include a large parking lot with a capacity of 900 vehicles and a bus terminal with 49 spaces. Rental car agencies will make up the interior, along with various offices and catering facilities, and a 120-meter-long closed bridge will connect the buildings, with traffic in both directions. At the other end of the bridge (or tunnel), passengers will enter the main area where all the roads cross - on the right for check-in, up for departures, left for arrivals. Thirty counters are already fully equipped; they only need to be dressed up.
“Our capacity will be around 3,000 passengers per hour so that we will serve at least five million a year without any problems,” said Pero Bilas.
The most important part of the entire facility - the baggage handling system, is the heart of each airport. Split Airport invested 55 million kuna in this part of the project, which they have bought from reputable Dutch companies, with two powerful X-rays produced by the United States.
The trip of a single suitcase is impressive. As Bilas pointed out, the whole process is automated, with a few extra points to check the baggage that X-rays mark as suspicious. From the check-in, the luggage will travel for a kilometer and is automatically deployed to the location of the aircraft, and in the opposite direction, the luggage automatically meets five large carousels for passengers.
On the top floor for departures, there are seven new lines for security, also automated with many cool details that should make the process move much faster and easier.
"And here, in the main area along the gates to the airplanes, there should no longer be those crowds, even in the heart of the summer,” Bilas added.
Namely, there will be a total of 1,200 seating spaces with six exits, and with another five hundred in various catering facilities, which will be more than enough for the hordes of passengers traveling through Split every year. Duty-free stores will be exactly four times bigger than in the past and will be filled with at least 50% Croatian products.
Over fifty airlines will fly to Split this summer on regular routes to over a hundred destinations.
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