Atul and Viren Ahuja’s story may be one of the most remarkable in the history of the duty free industry. And yet the tale of how they created an unlikely business empire in India’s notoriously complex travel retail sector has never been fully told. Until now that is. I met with Atul (above) at his
Miscellaneous
The Moodie Blog in India: Mumbai modernisation set to deliver the spirit of India
It’s arguably the most complex modernisation in the history of the airport industry. Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, the gateway to Mumbai, is currently developing a new integrated (domestic and international) terminal, one designed to handle 40 million passengers and due for completion by 2012. Because of quite extraordinary space constraints – much of the land (276 acres, in
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Airlines
The Moodie Blog in India: All change in Mumbai
Welcome to Mumbai. I have arrived in this incredible city of an estimated thirteen million – more than triple the population of my native New Zealand. It is rainy season here and the roads, always jammed, are worse than ever thanks to the pools of water everywhere. This fervent city is the home of India’s commercial
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Airports
The Moodie Blog in India – A Scotsman in Delhi
Gavin McKechnie has seen plenty of challenges during a long career in retail and other customer-facing sectors that began many years ago as a management trainee at McDonald’s (“I still say I learned more there in ten months in terms of people management than I’ve ever learned since”). But he’s never seen anything like the opportunity
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Miscellaneous
The Moodie Blog in India: Day 5 – Destination Delhi
Every time I visit India’s airports, I feel I am watching history being made. There’s an incredible sense of momentum here, with two new greenfield airports – Bangalore and Hyderabad – being opened in the past few months, and sweeping, ambitious, complex modernisations taking place in Delhi and Mumbai. There are also dozens of other airport developments
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Airports
The Moodie Blog in India: Day 4 and 5 – High hopes in Hyderabad are delivered
A year ago, during my last visit to India, Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad looked like this… And this… And there – being helpfully pointed out by yours truly – were the duty free shops, or at least their work in progress… It was a construction site. An ambitious, well-advanced construction site, to be fair, but
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Miscellaneous
The Moodie Blog in India: Day 4 – A quiet miracle worker brings smiles to Hyderabad
Some time this week, probably on Friday afternoon, a quietly spoken miracle worker will transform the life of a young Indian boy. Both the boy and the miracle worker are well-known to readers of The Moodie Blog who followed our visit 13 months ago to Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad. Nizam’s is famous
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Miscellaneous
The Moodie Blog in India: Day 3 – BIAL delivers a new consumer experience in Bangalore
Meet Mr S Shriram, ‘Shri’ to his friends and colleagues, Senior Manager Travel Retail for Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL). As I write this Blog, 45 minutes before taking my flight to Hyderabad Airport on the next leg of my journey through India, Mr Shriram is sitting right alongside me. He has just set me up
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Miscellaneous
The Moodie Blog in India – Bengaluru International Airport
A year ago I strapped myself in as we raced down the runway at the new Bengaluru International Airport in Bangalore. Except on that occasion I was in a car, as I joined Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) management and senior executives from two of its leading concessionaires – HMSHost and The Nuance Group –
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Airports
The Moodie Blog in India: Day 2 – How commercial aspirations came true in Cochin
Cochin Duty Free may just be one of the most under-rated success stories in the global travel retail business. And Cochin International Airport (pictured above) surely deserves more exposure too for its impressive championing of the Sense of Place concept and its unrelenting commitment to corporate social responsibility. Those are just some of our impressions
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Miscellaneous
The Moodie Blog in India – Day 2: ‘God’s own country’ – Kerala
Kerala’s natural beauty is legendary. The state’s official tourism website (www.keralatourism.org) dubs it ‘God’s own country’ and talks of it as a place where “the green, verdant carpets unfold”. Waking up early and looking out the window from my temporary Moodie Report Indian Bureau at the splendid Le Meridien Resort & Convention Centure in Cochin
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Airports
The Moodie Blog in India – Day 1: Cochin
The Moodie Report – and, of course, The Moodie Blog – are back in India, beginning a five-day whistlestop tour of this amazing country. Tonight I arrived via Singapore to Cochin International Airport, gateway to beautiful Kerala and home to Alpha Kreol, India’s longest-running duty free success story. Despite the late hour (well after 10p.m)