Duty Free World Council President Frank O’Connell told last month’s Meadfa Conference that the industry must now stand up and literally be counted.

 

Speaking at the two-day event in Dubai, he left delegates in no doubt about the considerable challenges facing the travel retail industry, but he also highlighted ways to combat them.

 

The first priority is ‘knowing our industry’, he said: “If we really dig down, we really don’t know our industry at all,” he said, highlighting that there is very little social/employment industry data available.

 

“We don’t know how many people are employed…we need to gather this information and have it to hand when organisations attack our industry,” he added.

 

During his presentation he also confirmed that the DFWC is currently exploring ways in which it could implement a duty free and travel retail academy in a bid to better educate industry professionals.

 

SETTING NEW STANDARDS

The new DF&TR academy initiative will strive to set standards and partner with universities to give accreditation to degree courses. A ‘working group’, which has now been set up will be chaired by Christine Martin, Managing Director of Travel Retail Training (TRT), and this will scope out the possibility of an academy.

 

O’Connell also updated delegates on the new LAGs security regime – which is a three-phase approach to lifting restrictions on liquids, based on new screening technology.

 

He reminded the audience that the new regulations actually allow the industry to sell to transferring passengers once again, but while he termed Phase 1 ‘a success’, he said the proposal to allow for the carriage of clear liquids over 100ml (Phase 2) would unfortunately not be going ahead.

 

Because passenger throughput could be greatly adversely affected, O’Connell said he now does not envision any change for the liquid security system in the next four five years.

 

He also addressed more pressing issues – such as the threat of more sophisticated and well-hidden explosives – which have seen the implementation of further security measures relating to electronic devices at airports in the US and Europe.

 

 

Left to right: Sean Staunton, President of Meadfa, Michael Barrett, Meadfa Moderator (and Executive Officer for APTRA) and Frank O’Connell, President of the Duty Free World Council.

 

 

HOSTILE REGULATORY ENVIRONMENT

Moving on, he also highlighted that the industry is suffering from an increasingly hostile regulatory environment for tobacco as he referenced the WHO conference of the Parties (CPO6) held in Moscow in October 2014.

 

Alarmingly, he said this conference revealed that the price and taxation policy in Article 6 is being misrepresented and that some NGOs are proposing a ban on all duty free tobacco sales.

 

O’Connell also talked about threats to other product categories, such as liquor and confectionery involving multi-lingual nutritional information and ingredient labelling in Europe, plus health warnings.

 

He said this is causing big problems for some duty free suppliers, since language requirements and minimum font type sizes are forcing some confectionery companies to apply layered labels to their products, so incurring significant time and production on-costs.

 

 

In summary, O’Connell’s overriding message is that the industry ‘must gain acceptance’. He said DF&TR is a unique retail channel deserving its own set of fair regulations and this must be the constant mantra from all stakeholders across all categories in the industry.

 

An in-depth video interview recorded by TRBusiness with Frank O’Connell in October 2014 addresses all of the above issues in-depth, plus funding issues, academic opportunities and the creation of an industry ‘databank’. This can be found at the following link: http://www.trbusiness.com/index.php/regional/international/16275-video-interview-frank-oconnell.html