BWI Airport Completes $520M Terminal Modernization

Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) has completed a $520 million terminal enhancement project primarily benefiting Southwest Airlines.

 

Southwest has a roughly 70% passenger market share at BWI, its largest East Coast airport. The project, on which construction started in 2022, added 142,000 ft.² of new space to the airport’s passenger terminal and renovations to 78,000 ft.² of existing infrastructure.

 

The project added a two-level structure that will serve to directly connect the airport’s A and B concourses, enabling passengers to move faster between the two concourses Southwest uses.

 

BWI also installed a new baggage handling system, which includes in-line screening of checked bags, to be used by Southwest. The system can handle 3,500 bags per hour, 1,400 more than the system it replaced.

 

The project included the relocation of five gates, with glass passenger boarding bridges and “high-tech electrochromic glass for energy performance control and comfortable new seating with integrated charging ports,” the airport said. Five baggage claim carousels were replaced, and a new one was added.

 

Also included are 14,000 ft.² of space for new food and retail concessions. The airport said it built another 28,000 ft.² of shell space for future concessions.

 

Southwest operates around 230 daily departures from BWI to 82 destinations. The airline has 5,000 employees based at the airport. The carrier said the modernization project will enable it to add more service at BWI.

 

The new A-B concourse connector will help boost Southwest’s effort to transition to more connecting itineraries as it revamps its business model. Southwest COO Andrew Watterson explained during an earnings call last year that the carrier, which had historically been a point-to-point operator, has reorganized flight banks at BWI to allow for more connecting traffic, particularly for red-eye flights the airline introduced in 2025.

 

“We have a number of red-eyes now that arrive into Baltimore in the morning,” Watterson said. “And then those flights connect to flights predominantly northbound, shorter-haul flights from Baltimore. So, if you’re going from the West Coast to a smaller city on the East Coast, this is a very efficient itinerary for you to fly a red-eye into Baltimore and connect to the first flight [of the day].”