Olivier Dancette is the founder of HiDutyFree, which provides a third party for travel retail stakeholders. This is courtesy of an at home duty free shopping experience. At a time when the future of air travel is uncertain and even in question, could home duty free become one of the main ways of shopping?

Travel retail is not like we once knew it. Non-aeronautical revenue per passenger dipped in 2018, 2019 and needless to say has completely plummeted this year.

Is this due to a lack of emphasis on customer experience across the travel retail industry? Today, sharing boarding passes could be the new shopping window to the world for airports. It’s then time to reinvent airport customer experiences worldwide.

Travellers’ boarding passes could allow them to shop for others in the future, enabling matching transactions to be made outside the minimum annual guarantee box.

In this case, sharing a collaborative economy activates new avenues which could become a ‘blue ocean strategy’ for travel retail.

Indeed, most travellers do not always have something to buy for their own purpose, which is why hundreds of millions of travellers’ allowances go unused each year. So once again, there is something more to conceive.

‘CREATIVE AND POSITIVE RESPONSE’

Sharing the rights to buy airside would make an existing habit a social and sustainable experience. It would also be a creative and positive response to shopping tourism worldwide that will be banned post Covid-19. In addition, this is a proper answer to necessary ecological taxes on airline transport.

Based on this concept, the new digital travel retail ecosystem must facilitate shopping for others during international travel, whether it’s a friend or colleague.

Buyers would obtain rewards from airlines, shops or airports in return for their purchases.

This is really about taking advantage of one person traveling to serve someone else’s purpose or need in a win-win scenario.

If travel retail business suffers from not taking a stand in favour of the climate, it’s time to establish some ethical and ecological practices and create a new duty free organisation.

The HiDutyFree Marketplace intends to work towards this goal. Its mission is to allow home duty free shopping anywhere in the world thanks to frequent flyers.

It creates the right connection between all travel retail stakeholders. In fact, this is a great opportunity for brands, airports, airlines and travel retailers to begin collaborating and defending the same interests.

Under this mindset, home duty free shopping must spark new commercial niches and assure sustainability for all stakeholders.

How would the current framework function under this proposed new business model?

A picture speaks a thousand words.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the columnist’s and do not necessarily reflect those of TRBusiness.