Xavier Rossinyol: “Airports are smart. They want to maximise the customer experience by adapting to the consumer, and ultimately to maximise their P&L.”

The world’s largest travel retailer, Avolta – which has just made a significant acquisition in Asia-Pacific – continues to champion the concept of hybrid retail, where food and beverage (F&B) and retail products are combined in-store or in close quarters.

This idea, according to Avolta’s CEO Xavier Rossinyol, stems from the post-pandemic merger with Italy’s global food travel retailer Autogrill. “We should not look at this industry back to front,” he tells TRBusiness. “We had separated F&B and retail just because that’s the way we have traditionally been contracting in the industry. But if you flip it and look at it from the consumers’ or passengers’ perspective – from the front end – they simply want to have a fruitful, exciting experience.”

He adds: “When passengers have no time, they might just want to have a quick coffee and a croissant, or with more time, perhaps a bar tasting. So they might appreciate being in and around the retail area. And that’s what we’re trying to do. We first think about the passenger, about the flow, the shop and terminal design, and then define the retail and F&B.”

Different approaches from airport landlords, and a P&L imperative

This Motta cafe is inside Avolta’s duty-free store in Bergamo Airport.

Depending on the airport, not all shops or restaurants can be hybrid. Sometimes the main duty-free store and food courts are well delineated, but this is changing. Heathrow is now experimenting with what it calls blended retailing: mixing different retail, F&B, pharmacy, and/or convenience elements together, exemplified by WHSmith’s one-stop shops and Lagardère’s new Relay stores.

Frankfurt’s new Terminal 3 is somewhere in between. Fraport/Heinemann’s joint venture duty-free store stands alone, but the food courts are nestled close to the retail units and not in a separate area. Avolta’s Origin bar is the centrepiece that pulls the entire commercial offer together.

As of December 31, 2025, Avolta operated 33 hybrid outlets worldwide. Rossinyol comments: “When we announced the merger more than three years ago, we explained the hybrid logic, and some said that it would never work because airports would want one or the other. But airports are smart. They want to maximise the customer experience by adapting to the consumer, and ultimately to maximise their P&L.”

At Milan Bergamo Airport (BGY) in Italy, Motta’s trademark cappuccinos and cream and pistachio croissants are bestsellers, encouraging customers to keep browsing the retail. The cafe is set inside Avolta’s duty-free store.

Consumers are also well used to the merging of retail in the High Street. Major fashion brands across all price points have coffee shops, while department stores have long had restaurants – sometimes multiple venues, as at luxury magnet Harrods. In effect, travel retail is playing catch-up.

The strategic value of hybrid retail

At the airport, introducing hybrid F&B concepts can also be strategic. “It’s a way to slow people down and to relax,” explains Rossinyol. “It can also potentially attract consumers into a store who may not even look at it, for example, if you put a sports bar in a duty-free store. Of course, this increases the level of complexity. To solve that, we are using more and better data. This is our other strategic bet, and the two reinforce each other.”

F&B and retail together generate quality data, and this is especially important in large hub airports. Why? Because every store and/or location can have a very different consumer almost every hour. Therefore, having the right data is critical in lifting transaction volumes.

In closing, Rossinyol says: “Going back to the merger, it was not a financial decision to have a bigger portfolio of different things. It was a new focus on the consumer. And the next rational decision was to start blending what we had.”

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