The industry's two leading trade press media groups were yesterday highly critical of retailers who knowingly sell duty free liquid/gel-based products to passengers with the full knowledge that they will be confiscated.

Speaking from the floor at yesterday's ACI Europe Trading Conference in Monaco, Martin Moodie of The Moodie Report and Doug Newhouse from TREND/The Travel Retail Business both separately voiced their concerns at this disgraceful practice which is only adding to the image problems that the international travel retail industry currently faces alongside increased security regulations.

In what some might have seen as an unusual and temporary ‘holy alliance’ both editors separately commented that it was perfectly obvious that while most airports and retailers were selling responsibly, several were clearly selling goods they knew would be confiscated from passengers at EU transit points in European airports.

Both called on airports and retailers to be more responsible for the good of the business as a whole and this was a message that was repeated by European Travel Retail Council President Frank O'Connell.

He referred to the high level of confiscations at EU airports as ‘untenable’ in his earlier address and Bart Mos, Senior Security Adviser at Schiphol Airport acknowledged that the problem continued to be a serious one.

In the first week after the strict liquids regulations were introduced he said that Schiphol was confiscating 13,000 litres a week and right now it is taking about 1,000 litres a day from disappointed passengers. While he added that this included bottles of water, he also conceded that a great deal of the confiscated goods represented passenger purchases.

Separate comments at various points in the conference also mentioned several other EU and EU-affiliated airports where confiscation levels are high.

Asked by The Business whether Schiphol and other airports could not readily identify the source of these confiscated purchases, Mos said it was very difficult, although one major travel retailer told us in the coffee break later that he did not think that this was the case at all.

He said he was perfectly sure that some big operators were guilty of the practice and their identities would surely be revealed in the months to come.

Several delegates also said that they feared that this problem might well become worse before it gets better with the busy summer period for Europeans only a few months away.

Tellingly, O'Connell said that the immediate damage to passenger purchasing behaviour may not be apparent until next year when the thousands of holidaymakers and travellers that have already had goods confiscated this time around decide to shun the shops altogether when they travel again.