Latest posts by Martin Moodie (see all)
- From ‘Fast, Factual, Free’ to ‘The website that never sleeps’ – 24 years on - September 16, 2026
- Discovering a Spirit of Legacy with Hennessy in Hong Kong - September 14, 2026
- Why Peter Pan was right as I head straight on to the morn - September 1, 2026
Old man, look at my life
Twenty-four, and there’s so much more
– Old Man, Neil Young
“Ok here we go.”
And with those four words, 24 years ago to this day, The Moodie Report (as it was then known) was born.
With a single keystroke the first edition of travel retail’s newest title was making its way via email to its equally fledgling readership base.
I didn’t know it then but it would turn out to be a defining moment in my life, albeit one conducted from the grandeur of Moodie International’s ‘Worldwide Headquarters’ – my garden shed in West London, my only staff the four goldfish I called the Finnish team members.
By appearance at least, The Moodie Report’s debut was of the distinctly humble kind. A six-page pdf, all black and white apart from a splash of red on the front page. No frills, no photos, no advertising and – crucially as it turned out – no subscription fee.
Published initially in cooperation with my great friend, the late Yngve Bia, Founder of Generation Publications in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden, it bore the mantra ‘Fast, Factual, Free’.
Fast, courtesy of its e-delivery, it certainly was. “The internet will always beat the postman,” I would tell people in attempting to convince them of the title’s innate advantage over the powerful print-based rivals of the time.
Factual, most definitely, expressed via a focus not only on travel retail’s latest happenings but the drivers underpinning the industry – traffic numbers, currency changes, a stock market performance index of sector players, and more.
As for the ‘Free’, I vividly recall several senior industry figures telling me how much they admired the content but that to be commercially viable I would surely have to charge a subscription fee. “People will pay for it – we certainly will,” opined Charles Richardson, the hugely supportive then-President of Allied Domecq (remember them?) Duty Free.
But I didn’t want to do that. Digital publishing was in its infancy and I knew that no matter how good the content, I couldn’t build the required market penetration via a paid model. The same principle applied a few months later with the launch of The Moodie Report.com – soon dubbed with the semantically questionable but memorable sobriquet ‘The website that never sleeps’. No padlocks. No passwords. Open to all from the boardroom to the shop floor.
I didn’t know it back then but on that fateful September morn, all of 8,766 days ago, a redefining of travel retail B2B publishing was underway.
Indeed, we were one of the first digital disrupters in the travel retail industry per se, a sector that had barely dipped its toes into online communication or commerce.
I am so proud to see how what is now The Moodie Davitt Report has developed since, born along its journey by the immense industry support we have enjoyed and the quality of the team, past and present, we have built.
As I prepare to hand over the CEO reins to my colleague Dermot Davitt on 1 October – coincidentally the final day of TFWA World Exhibition in Cannes – I take as much pride in that first unadorned edition from 24 years ago as seeing its highly sophisticated market-leading multi-media descendent of today. ✈