The second half of today’s first day at the Hong Kong Trinity Forum 2015 saw the airport perspective (Part 1) featuring ‘Future Positive’ occupy the midday session, featuring Glyn Williams, General Manager, Retail, Sydney Airport; Cissy Chan, Executive Director Commercial, HKIA; and Sang-Joon Ahn, Vice President Commercial, Bangalore International Airport.

Glyn Williams, General Manager, Retail, Sydney Airport talked about the Sydney Airport Terminal 1 strategy, with the transformation focused solidly on the airline and passenger experience. He said the investment was based on extensive airline, passenger and retailer feedback.

As covered extensively by TRBusiness in an exclusive interview with Williams recently, this also involves the creation of the largest duty free shop in the world. The new path is straight and quite opposite to the winding path format that is traditionally seen in duty free stores around the world.

He said that it is the winding path that usually annoys some passengers who have to make their way through a duty free store if they just want to get to their gate lounge.

As reported earlier, he also confirmed that Heinemann has now moved into its 3,500sq m of new retail space incorporating multiple language signage, while the airport has also enhanced the whole F&B experience.

Williams said that Sydney’s position statement on the subject is that it wants the airport to have the greatest retail and it is looking to try and attract brands to work with the airport before launching in the domestic market.

He said the airport sees itself as part of the global community as well as Australia, so hence the need for global brands. He also added that in this reconfiguration, every single retail location is being changed.

Meanwhile, for her part at Hong Kong International Airport, Cissy Chan, Executive Director Commercial said the airport is concentrating on the passenger experience, utilising the four ‘Es’ which she qualified as eating, entertainment, ease and engagement.

She said she wants to make it exciting having researched that most people shop because they are bored. As a result, the airport is installing interactive amusements in relevant shops to build up interest, while pop up stores will also feature more regularly while the airport is also working on building in entertainment facilities like virtual golf zone.

The airport is also employing food court ambassadors to find seats for passengers who are already holding trays of food, alongside a service pledge of 15 minutes, plus it is experimenting with a local delivery service for local passengers who spend more than HK$1,000.

HKIA is also going to experiment with trial deliveries to the homes of a few individuals in two other countries as a trial run.

The next presentation was by Sang-Joon Ahn, Vice President Commercial, Bangalore International Airport who confirmed that Bangalore is the number three airport after Delhi and Mumbai in India.

He said that 65% of all the airport’s duty free sales are in the liquor category, with the majority sold to arriving passengers.

 

 

 

 

The next session after lunch was entitled ’The brand perspective’, featuring Francis Gros, Head of Global Channels Division, Luxottica who told everyone in the room that it was time to ‘get real’.

He said the eyewear company had come to the conclusion that its stores needed to be consistent and giving the same message. He also added that anything that is consumer centric must be good for the company’s brands, but how did he see the Trinity response in future?

With the dynamic passenger growth expected in future, he said there will be plenty of people who want to buy their brands, although the traveller has never been a captive customer. He said the business has to move from being a channel of experts to an expert channel.

Part of this involves getting real, being relevant, experiential and avant-garde while also providing leadership. He said brand owners have created high consumer expectations and in they will need to be even more relevant.

At the same time, consumers want to connect with these brand values and he said that airport shops can be great for this. Exclusivity is still a big draw as he quoted from Philippe Schaus’ presentation earlier in the day.

Brands will need to have a bigger focus on bespoke offerings, while retailers will also have to ‘get real’ by moving from spaces to places. He said that if a consumer continues to visit stores it will be because that store offers them something the Internet cannot, such as a human encounter or even facial recognition.

Gros added that there will be 50bn IP connected devices by 2022 and the Sixth Continent as it is known will also need a sixth sense to go with it, including a sense of place. He said that the extent of online business is now substantial, with the John Lewis department store group in the UK for instance making some 33% of its current sales online.

He also pointed to the Korean giants of Lotte and Shilla as the masters in the digital promotion stakes based on their long associations with customers using smart phones.

Airports will need to show more leadership in future he says, although at the support level they are getting better. As an industry he added that everyone is also going to have to be far more willing to share data in a real Trinity agreement.

In a change of mood, how the next generation sees the future of airport retail was the next topic on the agenda featuring Eva Yu, Managing Director of L’Oréal Travel Retail Asia Pacific. This session turned its attention to the 23 years that L’Oréal has hosted its business competition for students from 45 countries and over 360 universities around the world.

Each year it asks them to let their creativity run free to apply ground-breaking ideas to one of the beauty company’s international brands and distribution channels, with this year’s chosen subject being airport retail.

This year, an impressive 13,000 students participated in this competition with the whole exercise receiving tremendous coverage on social media, with the Italian team finally proving triumphant.

The airport perspective (Part 2) was the next session entitled, ‘Becoming obsessed with the consumer’ and this featured Guy Stephenson, Chief Commercial Officer of Gatwick Airport; Wolfgang Weil, International Airport COO and Member of the Board of Directors at Xi’an Xianyang Airport; and Sanjay Khanna, Senior Vice President (Commercial), Mumbai International Airport Pvt Ltd.

Guy Stephenson, kicked off proceedings with an introduction of the airport and its busiest single runway in the world. He said the airport is immersed in what consumers want at Gatwick, which is an old airport with legacy infrastructure from which management obviously has to extract value.

He said the airport has spent around £1.5bn on the airport to date and is continuing to spend more as it conducts some 100,000 interviews with passengers a year on service standards, buying trends, demographic attitudes, brand aspirations, price perceptions and reasons for not purchasing.

He days they also constantly measure their check in performance with heavy investments in bag drop technology greatly reducing queues and processing people quickly and in good shape so they can move through to the retail outlets. In addition, he added that far from a foe, he sees digital as a friend of the business

There is also the myGatwick service which personalizes the airport journey for passengers and more than 1m passengers and others have currently signed up to this, with Stephenson saying it offers great deals and reward points and more.

Next up was Wolfgang Weil, International Airport COO and Member of the Board of Directors at Xi’an Xianyang Airport who said that this year the facility will handle some 30m passengers at Xi’an. He promptly then proceeded to tell the audience how to get potential Trinity partners to work together at an airport.

[Wolfgang Weil and Xi’an Airport were featured in the TRBusiness China’s Century Conference magazine for delegates in Shanghai last March-Ed]

Weil said one of the trademarks of Trinity is that it is a debate but while it is appreciated by almost everyone, the implementation is somewhat more complicated – with the great wall of Trinity standing between the concept and the reality.

Thinking out of the box is the answer, he said with the need to create a forum where the airlines, handling agents and airports can all work together to promote cooperative and transparent relationships. He then promptly proposed a series of working groups to try to address the issues, with all parties signing up to an agreement there and then in front of 390 witnesses at the Trinity event.

The last up in this series of presentations was Sanjay Khanna, Senior Vice President (Commercial), Mumbai International Airport Pvt Ltd.

He said that the airport landscape is changing while the expectations of customers are growing, but the vacation must still start at the airport. He advocated more personalisation and digital aids as airports have now become modern-day oasis for aspirational brands and a commercial enclave for local commercial goods.

Khanna said that Mumbai has multiple customer segments with whom to engage its passengers and its ongoing activities now include new concept stores, flash mobs, a kids play area, flight simulators and other gaming. He said the airport is also home to traditional Indian art and design and also houses one of the largest collections of antiques from across India.

It also operates a loyalty programme to build increased value for passengers and a shop before you arrive service is also in the pipeline for launch shortly.