Dubai’s $35 Billion Airport Move: CEO Paul Griffiths on What Comes Next

Dubai is getting ready to build the world’s largest aviation hub. Yet Paul Griffiths, chief executive of the city’s airport operator, insists that size is not the only factor. “What people really want out of an airport is a very, very simple, intuitive experience.”

That vision will define the decade ahead as Dubai prepares to shift aviation’s center of gravity from Dubai International (DXB) – already the world’s busiest international airport – to Dubai World Central (DWC) by 2032.

DXB will close once DWC is fully operational, completing one of the most delicate transitions in modern aviation: winding down a 115-million-passenger airport while scaling up another designed to handle more than twice that. The project is budgeted at more than $35 billion.

Asked by Skift how the existing site will cope with rising demand ahead of 2032, Griffiths said the interim goal was not more terminals but smarter systems. “Capacity and service quality