Destination Delhi as T3 opening looms

The Moodie Report is in Delhi, where we’ll be helping to chair a GMR conference on the exciting new Terminal 3 at Delhi Indira Gandhi International Airport which opens in a few months, in plenty of time for September’s Commonwealth Games. First I had to fly out of another T3 – at London Heathrow. I

Read More

Joining the Twittering classes

[Picture: Samira Moodie] It’s official, I am now a Twitterer. In fact I’ve been Tweeting for the past two days. Please, save those unkind comments. For so are all my colleagues at The Moodie Report. In fact our Irish Deputy Publisher Dermot Davitt did his first Tweet yesterday and they’re already talking about it, maybe

Read More

Martha returns to Europe

What an astute move by The Nuance Group Europe CEO Andrea Belardini to bring in Martha Rosas as European Category Director – Speciality. Martha is held not only in great regard in the business with with great fondness. That’s because she is an outstandingly decent individual who has brought great human as well as commercial qualities

Read More

Louis Vuitton booms at Lotte Duty Free

It’s a Tuesday afternoon at Lotte Duty Free’s flagship downtown store in Seoul on a bitterly cold winter’s day. That’s hardly peak time for the country’s leading duty free operation, yet young, fashionable, acutely brand-conscious young Japanese and Korean women are queued down the aisle to enter Lotte’s Louis Vuitton boutique. “You want to see it

Read More

A welcome relationship

It’s encouraging to see a closer relationship being forged between ACI Europe and the European Travel Retail Council (ETRC) at this year’s ACI Europe Trading Conference & Exhibition in Malta (26-28 April). Unveiling details of the programme, ACI Europe Director General Olivier Jankovec (pictured) said that in order to address a number of threats, industry

Read More

Jeju’s thriving Korean travel retail outpost

It’s been a long day. This morning I set off from my hotel at 7.30a.m to Gimpo Airport in Seoul to take an early flight to Jeju – the holiday island off the south of the Korean peninsula. Jeju is the home of a thriving duty free sector – both traditional duty free and also

Read More

Consolidation fever in Seoul

The Moodie Report is in Seoul, heartland of South Korea’s lucrative – and fast-changing – travel retail industry. I’ve been coming here regularly since the early 1990s and it’s been fascinating to watch the evolution of the business – both on-airport and downtown – into one of the best in the world. Back then, Gimpo

Read More

Leaving on a jet plane – from Heathrow Terminal 4

Airport: London Heathrow Terminal 4 Date: 16 January 2010 Destination: Incheon, South Korea Airline: Korean Air Flight time: 20.10 My arrival time at the airport: 18.05 The Moodie Report is on the road again – this time to the South Korean capital of Seoul, entering via the country’s main gateway Incheon International Airport. I flew

Read More

Snowed in and snowed under at The Moodie Report

The weather outside is frightful But our work is so delightful The Moodie Report has to go So let it snow, let it snow, let it snow ‘The mail must get through’. That used to be the motto of the famed Pony Express in 19th Century America, when the mail was delivered by horseback. One

Read More

Korean Air remembers Lars Johansson

Do gestures come any more lovely than this? The front cover of the latest limited-edition version of Korean Air’s SkyShop magazine is dedicated to the memory of Lars Johansson, the man synonymous with the extraordinary success of Inniskillin Icewine in travel retail. Tragically, Lars passed away suddenly during October 2009’s TFWA World Exhibition in Cannes.

Read More

Adding character and colour to The Moodie Blog

Ever since The Moodie Blog was launched in September 2006, it has been accompanied by a chirpy bunch of characters who, appropriately, share The Moodie Report Publisher’s initials. Legend has it that all the M&M’s characters gathered together back then and decided it was exactly the colourful sort of column they should be associated with.

Read More

Changi Terminal 3 – a traveller’s haven

Every time The Moodie Blog visits an airport (incognito) during 2010 we’ll try to record our impressions from a consumer’s (rather than journalist’s) perspective. Our first stop for the New Year – and the new decade – was Singapore Changi Airport Terminal 3. Is there a better, more consumer-friendly terminal in the world than this

Read More

Supporting travel retail’s marathon man

On 19 April some 25,000 runners will gather at the start line of the Boston Marathon – known as the ‘Holy Grail’ of long-distance running. One of those participants will be from the travel retail community – The Estée Lauder Companies Travel Retailing Worldwide President Olivier Bottrie. Olivier is no stranger to the loneliness –

Read More