Latest posts by Martin Moodie (see all)
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- Eating cats and dogs in media land - September 11, 2024
- Won’t see the golden of the sun when I’m gone - September 7, 2024
This Blog begins in my carefully cocooned China Eastern Interim Bureau, open for business 36,000 feet above Kunming, en route to Shanghai and onto Hong Kong.
I’m sipping on my third Coke Zero of the journey, balanced out with a couple of orange juices. China Eastern flights in and out of Riyadh are dry, in respect to Saudi Arabia’s laws, so the nicely chilled Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc I’m looking forward to will have to wait.
That Sauvignon Blanc is highly likely to be Cloudy Bay, given that my next stop a day after arriving in Hong Kong is Macau for the annual DFS Masters of Wines & Spirits, one of my favourite occasions in the travel retail calendar. After that it is down to Brisbane on Monday for another key gathering. More of that in a subsequent Blog.
I have been in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the ACI Asia-Pacific and Middle East and ACI World Annual General Assembly (WAGA) Conference and Exhibition this week, an important gathering of airport sector leaders from around the globe.
The event represented a welcome chance to catch up with many colleagues from the Saudi and Middle East travel retail sector, including Riyadh Airports Company Chief Commercial Officer Abdulaziz Al-Asaker and Matarat .
There is so very much going on in the Saudi aviation, tourism and travel retail worlds and it’s little wonder that WAGA attracted such a big audience. I will be spending a great deal more of my time in the Kingdom going forward and I will not be alone within the travel retail community.
As mentioned in my last Blog, besides supporting our long-term Trinity Forum partners ACI World and ACI Asia-Pacific & Middle East, I had the privilege of moderating on-stage discussions with Avolta CEO Xavier Rossinyol and IPP Travel Retail CEO Phillip Nguyen (IPP Group is co-hosting this November’s Trinity Forum alongside Airports Corporation of Vietnam).
You don’t meet a more dynamic duo than this in our industry. Xavier is cleverly, ambitiously and strategically fusing the formerly disparate Dufry and Autogrill components into an increasingly harmonious whole. The 20 minutes or so we had together on stage left no-one in the audience in any doubt about the strength of his consumer-centric vision and his determination and ability to deliver it.
And Phillip? Let’s just say if we could bottle his enthusiasm – it would be an EDP(hillip), of course – and spray it liberally over our industry, things would get done at twice the pace they currently do. The Ho Chi Minh City Trinity Forum promises to be a hell of an affair. Do not miss it.
