再Airport shopping, May 10th 2014 P59 (空港免税売店)
Qatar's new airport, which opened on April 30th, offers travellers a “stunning”terminal with 25,000 square meters for shops and restaurants (plus a “uniquely shaped”mosque). Shops in Abu Dhabi's Midfield terminal, planned for 2017, will be arrayed around an indoor park, with “Mediterranean plants and features at its centre, and desert landscapes at its edge.” Passengers travelling through Heathrow's Terminal 2, which opens in June, will munch on wood-fired pizza and consult concierges to help them shop. Once a way for passengers to load up on cheap booze and cigarettes, “travel retail”(which takes place mostly, but not entirely, in airports) is now a big part of many brands' strategies and of airports' revenues. Pernod Ricard, a French drinks company, and L'Oreal, a French maker of cosmetics and perfume, consider it to be their “sixth continent”. Luxottica, an Italian maker of sunglasses, calls airport sales “the Formula 1 of retail”. Airports are hardly less giddy. Their income from landing fees and passenger charges has been squeezed by regulators and budget airlines. They have responded by boosting “non-aeronautical income”, a big part of which is their cut of sales in shops. There have been shocks. The abolition of duty-free sales within the European Union in 1999 looked like the end for a big chunk of the business. Terrorists, epidemics and recessions have deterred travellers. But since 2009 sales have grown by more than 12% a year. Half the growth comes from a rise in number of passengers, especially from countries newly gripped by wanderlust, like China. A bit is inflation. The rest comes from travellers' greater appetite for shopping on the go, and from retailers' growing skill in feeding it. Once passengers step through the security scanners a “golden hour”begins. Most are relatively prosperous；all are briefly at loose ends. Airport retailers, knowing the flight schedules and shopping habits of travellers according to their boarding cards, are primed to receive them. Unlike high-street shops, airport outlets know when their customers will show up, notes Muriel Zingraff-Shariff, until recently Heathrow's retail director. They can plan for an influx of brandy-sipping Nigerians or of Chinese women in search of moisturisers. That makes airports “a data paradise”. World Duty Free Group (WDFG), Heathrow's “anchor”retailer, plugs the data into its software so that speakers of the right languages and cultural sensitivities will be on hand. Brazilian women are happy to have a perfume spritzed on their bodies；with the Chinese you use a tester. Shop displays can be reconfigured to suit national tastes. For morning flights to Barbados, the cognac “gondola”is stocked with bottles of Courvoisier and Hennessy；cheaper brandies take their place for afternoon flights to America and Norway. High-street formulae must be tweaked. The airport assortment is narrow. Clothing is easy to try on (though Terminal 2 will beam boarding information to changing rooms.) Brands that seem snooty downtown present themselves more invitingly in terminals, with open doors and expanses of glass. To entice the richest travellers out of business lounges, where they tend to hunker down, Heathrow recently launched a “personal-shopper”service. Such tricks have built up shopping at airports, on board ferries and aeroplanes and at border crossings into a big business. In 2013 travel retailers sold around $60 billon of goods, according to Generation Research, a Swedish firm. (This does not count shopping in ordinary stores by tourists who later claim back value-added tax.) Sales at airports alone will grow by 73% from 2013 to 2019, predicts Verdict Retail, a consultancy. Cosmetics and perfumes have eclipsed alcohol and tobacco as the biggest-selling category. For most of L'Oreal's high-end brands, “travel retail”is one of the three biggest markets. Travel retail may matter even more to what brands do outside the quirky confines of terminals and cruise ships. It is a chance to show off to people who may become their best customers when they return home. Airports, with their giant hoardings and promotional spaces, are “media”, says Fabio d'Angelantonio, Luxottica's chief marketing officer. The Yves Saint Laurent range of cosmetics and perfumes was absent from China for three years until L'Oreal relauched it last year. Chinese shoppers did not forget about it during the hiatus. Travel retail“helped by keeping the brand in shops where 70-80% of the customers are Chinese,”says Barbara Lavernos, head of L'Oreal's recently created travel-retail division. Airports are laboratories. Sales of Cath Kidston's spot-spattered and flower-flecked knich-knacks are an early indicator of where the British chain might want to open stores overseas, says its commercial director, Chris McKendrick. Luxottica opened three Sunglass Hut boutiques in Italian airports in part to see how they might fare in the country at large. For L'Oreal travel retail serves as a “kind of control tower”, says Ms Lavernos. When she spots groups of travellers heading towards new destinations she alerts the company's agents in those markets. Shifting passenger flows will carve a new retail landscape. Dubai eclipsed Heathrow as the busiest international airport this year. The new Gulf terminals, with their lavish malls, will add to the region's pulling power. Upstarts like Istanbul aspire to the top league. Retailers in Asia's airports outsell Europe's by a bit already；by 2016 they will have more than double the sales of European ones. China recently allowed passengers flying into its two international airports, to shop for duty-free goods on travel. Trade is so far modest. But when it is established “arrivals duty free is a huge business,”says Martin Moodie of the Moodie Report, an industry newsletter. There is upheaval, too, among travel-retail specialists such as WDFG and Dufry. In recent concession agreements airports have raised their share of sales by 10-15 percentage points, according to a report by Santander, a bank. This crimps profits from some of the busiest bazaars. Korea's Shilla and Lotte, for example, are unlikely to make decent returns from Inchon airport, say Santander. In the face of such pressures big operators are gobbling up smaller ones. The share of the largest five has risen from 19% in 2005 to 40% in 2013, and more consolidation is to come. As predators grow, travel retailing will become glitzier and more seductive than ever.
