The concluding panel of the 2025 TR Consumer Forum looked at the future of the industry.

The closing session of the 2026 TR Consumer Forum distilled several insights and ideas discussed over the two-day conference as a panel of industry experts presented Travel Retail Vision 2030, a set of forward-looking scenarios exploring how travel retail can align air traffic evolution with shifting consumer behaviour.

Moderated by TRBusiness Editor Faye Bartle, the panel comprised spirits industry specialist Aude Bourdier, Founder & CEO, AMB Futureproof; digital transformation expert Vadim Wichmann, Managing Director, SHIFT – WITH Group Company; Adrian Hayes, Founder & Independent Travel Retail Strategist, Cortex TR, a consultant specialising in realising commercial potential; Lennard Niemann, Managing Director, Gharage; m1nd-set’s Clara Susset, underpinning the discussion with solid data; and Blueprint Partner Thomas Henningsen.

Setting a data-based foundation for the discussion, Susset opened with the numbers underpinning the conversation: international passenger traffic is forecast to grow at a CAGR of around 6% to 2030, adding roughly 750 million passengers a year across regions. The Middle East and Asia Pacific will lead on relative growth, she said, but Europe, starting from a much larger base, will still deliver the biggest absolute increase, with Asia Pacific close behind at some 246 million extra passengers annually by 2030.

She then crystallised the challenge facing the travel retail industry into a single line: “The defining characteristics of the 2026 market are high traffic, uneven regional recovery, stronger impulse purchasing, greater demand for value and exclusivity, and a consumer base that expects airport retail to be experiential, social and digitally connected.”

Susset ended her segment with a challenging question to the panel: “How can travel retail convert future passenger growth… into actually sustainable long-term commercial growth as well?”

The era of Gen Z is coming 

Henningsen stepped up to argue the real inflexion point will land closer to, or after, 2030, once Gen Z’s lifestyle, rather than its share of the population, comes to dominate consumer behaviour. He described that lifestyle as mobile-first, AI-fluent, and built around social commerce, with dwell-time giving way to what he called “living time”.

The discussion around a vision for 2030 showed that it is not as simple as it sounds.

Citing a Gen Z mentor’s assessment of her own habits, he offered one of the session’s sharpest lines: “One person said to me, ‘Scrolling is my cardio’.” For Henningsen, the remark captured exactly where attention, and future spend, is headed.

He closed with a warning against complacency: “This is not the time when we take travelling shoppers for granted… I haven’t met anybody yet who buys an airline ticket just to go shopping in an airport. That’s why it’s called travel retail.”

Bourdier, drawing on more than three decades in the industry, argued the channel’s defining trait is its resilience, having recovered from the abolition of EU duty-free in 1999 and from COVID. But she cautioned that today’s traveller base is too fragmented for uniform strategies to work, noting operators typically hold a fraction of the consumer data available in domestic retail.

“We borrow these guys and these women for three hours per year,” she said of the industry’s relationship with travellers, adding that the answer isn’t deeper segmentation alone but genuine flexibility: “We need to make him feel valued when he travels with us… not penalised.”

“Emotions drive behaviour”

Hayes made the case that human connection remains travel retail’s clearest advantage over AI-driven retail elsewhere, illustrating the point with an entertaining and affecting account of his own experience where a brand ambassador in a luxury store turned a small purchase into years of repeat business through remarkable attentiveness rather than upselling.

He distilled the lesson into a single line: “Emotion drives behaviour. The behaviour drives the spend, and the spend drives the profit.” For Hayes, the implication is organisational as much as it is philosophical, treating frontline staff as brand hosts rather than a cost line. He closed by calling for more industry effort to break down the silos that stop brands from training each other’s staff across categories.

It’s not the future – it’s now

Wichmann expressed frustration at the industry’s pace of change, arguing that digitalisation now sits alongside, rather than against, the in-store experience. He pointed to travel retail’s e-commerce penetration of under 1%, against 20-30% in Europe’s domestic cosmetics market, as evidence of how far behind the channel has fallen, and warned that invisibility online increasingly means invisibility to AI search tools altogether.

“If you are not present on the internet… you won’t be seen by AI,” Wichmann said, urging brands to engage travellers well before they reach the airport rather than waiting for them to step into the terminal. He closed his segment by urging delegates to “look outside the industry” to see what travel retail needs to support its future performance.

Ecosystem thinking: examining the winning elements in travel retail.

A question of credibility

In an intense and engaging Q&A, Bourdier echoed Wichmann’s call for the industry to take a sharper look at itself, including a warning about pricing. She argued that the era of instant price comparison has turned travel retail’s savings promise into a liability when it so often fails to uphold that promise. She referenced examples from spirits to a €15 sandwich and said that the damage extends across the whole channel once a traveller feels cheated, resonating into future journeys.

Susset consolidated that argument by citing research into non-buyers, including the example of a bottle of water’s price as grounds to avoid duty-free entirely, sometimes for good. Hayes shared an interesting reframing of this issue as “value indifference” and closed by warning that travellers “will spend more for a genuinely good experience, but nothing will offset a poor one”.