Up close and personal in travel retail
People often ask me where I see the next big opportunity in travel retail. Which market? Which consumers? Which categories? Three days in the Philippines has helped shape my answers. Except I wouldn’t say ‘next’ opportunity. It’s here. It’s now. It’s happening.
“When the wind blows,” was his evocative, very Chinese way of saying that big opportunity lies ahead and that CNSC must be ready.
Many commentators believe there may be truffle ahead in the Year of the Pig but to me that’s hogwash, the sort of prediction I might have made in my younger, rasher days.
I’ve been 32 years in travel retail now, the past 17 at The Moodie Davitt Report, and I can honestly say that I’m bringing as much energy into this one as I did all those years ago in 2002 when we set off on our journey.
We are, above all, an information service. But we are one with a voice. Those factors collectively bestow responsibility on us. Our information must be timely, reliable, accurate. Our voice must be responsible, ethical and selective.
I know the Irish founded the duty free industry but I didn’t realise they a) still populated it in such quantity and b) all had my phone number.
By the time my first coffee kicked in, I had big stories on the boil from the USA (14 hours behind) and Brazil (11 hours), and news in from New Zealand (four hours ahead). All I need is a store opening from Kiritimati and I could (almost) report on yesterday, today and tomorrow simultaneously.
Khun Vichai was a man not simply of great achievement but one of compassion, grace and humility. He gave then gave again to all manner of causes, big and small.
I am surprised that ACI Europe would allow such a blatantly self-serving, inaccurate and unfair article to be published.
Welcome to the age of the omnipresent e-commerce giants, the Black Swan of 21st century retail that, like all Black Swans, no-one saw coming out of the darkness and into the bright, blinking daylight of a reimagined shopping age.
In 1958, Aldo Vastapane created the first duty free shop at Brussels Airport Company; a humble incarnation of a retail concept that only existed at Shannon Airport in Ireland. What a beautiful image, so evocative of an age gone by.
“Media coverage is rarely without bias, especially in the B2B press.” Says who? What a shoddy, Trump-esque ‘fake news’ generalisation.
After an horrendous couple of days. it’s time to split. As in get the hell out of the UK and as in fly to Split.