Your Starbucks Drink Costs 50% More at Some Airports—Where You’ll Pay the Most and Least

Depending on what airport you’re flying from, your Starbucks drink could cost 50% more. One traveler catalogued Starbucks prices across major airports. They tracked the price of a plain grande coffee and a grande strawberry acai lemon refresher – across 24 major airports. And what they found is striking.

Here’s what they found for grande coffees – prices ranged from $3 in Salt Lake City to $5 in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.

Denver Airport Starbucks

And that complicated ‘Grande Strawberry Acai Lemonade Refresher’ – which I must admit I have no idea even what this is – was once again least expensive in Salt Lake City at $5.05 and came in at a whopping $8.15, again capturing the top spot, in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix – but also in Charlotte.

Airport Starbucks are not run by Starbucks. THey’re licensed by airport concessionaires. This was historically done with Host/HMSHost, but has expanded. Starbucks collects license fees and royalties, but doesn’t hold the leases or employ staff.

Many airports have pricing rules that constrain what concessionaires are allowed to charge passengers. Often this is called ‘street pricing’ where there has to be parity with off-airport prices or parity plus a fixed percentage.

That said, airports are expensive to operate in. They have high lease costs and high capital costs. It’s costly to bring things in through security and work with approved vendors. There are often higher airport minimum wages (and attracting workers into airports can be costly, anyway). You also have captive customers who can’t bring their own beverages in through TSA checkpoints. Street pricing is a mushy concept anyway.

And with Starbucks you don’t get a single company operating the stores. You don’t even get a single concessionaire anyway, e.g. Paradies Lagardère in addition to HMSHost. And my understanding is that licensed operators have some pricing discretion. This is an old Starbucks statement, and from a UK account, but this is consistent with how licensing usually works:

Hi there! Our pricing can vary depending on location and whether it is a company-operated or licensed store, as our licensed stores are able to set their own prices within a certain range.

— Starbucks UK (@StarbucksUK) May 6, 2019

Passenger mix varies at the airports, too, between price-sensitive leisure and business travelers on expense accounts.

Given the tiers of prices we see reported, that suggests consistent price books in use – set by concessionaire and/or region, layered with airport policy constraints. I’m not sure this explains the full variance, but it’s also good to know that in some places Starbucks just isn’t a good option but I guess in Salt Lake City they have to price coffee low to generate demand volume because much of the local market doesn’t drink it?

Incidentally, someone also crowdsourced pricing of Chex Mix across airports Once again Las Vegas had the most expensive prices. Salt Lake City was once again cheapest.

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