Airports’ ecosystems are adapting to Gen Z’s mobile-first, AI-powered and social media-friendly global lifestyles.

There’s no easy way to predict the future of travel retail, but forecasting remains an essential tool for building resilience in a rapidly changing world. We asked thought leaders on the topic to share their perspectives on how the sector is likely to evolve as we enter the next decade. 

What will surprise people most about travel retail in 2030?

“The biggest surprise will be hyper-personalised AI assistants that proactively and dynamically adapt to individual traveller’s shopping behaviours factoring in budget, dwell time, availability, convenience and pricing transparency,” said Thomas Kaneko Henningsen, Partner, Blueprint, who pointed to global shoppers increasingly utilising AI for price checking and product enquiries.

“When these behaviours migrate to travel retail, travellers’ AI assistants will help plan shopping experiences before they arrive at the airport. It is highly likely that the level of impulse shopping will drop dramatically because of this,” he said.

“Parallel to this, airports will evolve into global media content platforms. By 2030, commercial success will depend as much on hyper-personal shopping experiences, social media content, storytelling and ecosystem partnerships as it does on transactional shopping.”

The latter point is one that Lennard Niemann, Managing Director Gharage Ventures, concurs with: “Everyone’s bracing for some AI concierge that magically anticipates their needs, but that’s not the surprise,” he said. “The surprise is how much of the growth will come from retail media: screens, content, brand activations woven into the store and the journey. People underestimate how big that line item becomes.”

No matter how advanced the technology is, the enduring value of human connection – and the ability to leverage the uniqueness of the travel retail environment to deliver it – may prove to be a key differentiator when it comes to securing a competitive edge.

“The speed at which emotional engagement replaces product availability as the primary competitive advantage,” Adrian Hayes, Founder & Independent Travel Retail Strategist, Cortex TR, told us. “We’ve spent decades optimising for what we sell. By 2030, the differentiation will be entirely about how passengers feel when they engage with it. The concept of Unreasonable Hospitality – genuine, human-to-human connection that goes beyond service – will emerge as the most powerful competitive advantage in travel retail. Unlike price, product range, or store size, it is almost impossible to copy when done right. Organisations that haven’t made this shift will find themselves at a significant disadvantage to those who do.”

Ultimately, the channel’s “unyielding resilience and adaptability” will see it through the next four years, asserted Aude Bourdier, Founder & CEO, AMB Futureproof.

“Critics have repeatedly predicted the sector’s demise, from the termination of intra-EU duty-free to the global pandemic, yet the industry has not only survived but thrived,” she reasoned. “By 2030, the most striking factor will be the sector’s proven ability to absorb geopolitical shocks and external disruptions, emerging stronger each time. The narrative of fragility will finally be replaced by a recognition of adaptability.”

Robot bartenders in the Lotte Duty Free store at Gimpo International Airport.

What part of today’s travel retail model will no longer exist by 2030?

The rise of ecommerce is playing a role in making traditional retail built around transactional shopping feeling increasingly outdated, in the eyes of Henningsen. “The assumption that travellers will automatically shop because they are captive audiences is already breaking down,” he said. “As Gen Z becomes the largest customer profile by 2028 representing 1.2 billion travellers, according to m1nd-set, and with a NielsenIQ forecast showing a global spending power of $12 trillion by 2030 (the biggest ever by any generation), this mobile-first, AI-powered and social media-friendly global lifestyle will expect airports’ ecosystems to adapt to them, not the other way around; they will want to travel as they live. To future-proof this, airports, operators and brands will increasingly monetise unique shopping experiences, dwell time quality, data intelligence, social media content and omnichannel engagement.”

Key to cracking this will be breaking down silos.

“I’ve long believed that alignment across all parties – from airport to retailer to brand – is fundamental to unlocking real commercial performance,” said Hayes. “By 2030, the most successful operators will have moved beyond individual KPIs and organisational boundaries. Airports, retailers, and brands will team up with a single shared purpose – elevating the passenger journey. Right now we measure everything except whether the passenger feels valued and wants to engage more deeply in what we’re offering. That fragmented approach will be seen as commercially inefficient. The operators that thrive will be those that designed around passenger journeys, not organisational structures.”

The need for stakeholders being more symbiotic could, in fact, reach a tipping point.

“While abrupt obsolescence is unlikely in an evolutionary industry, the loss-making concession model is on borrowed time. This unsustainable framework creates a downward spiral: retailers operating at a deficit cannot invest in innovation or experience, ultimately failing the traveller. By 2030, we can hope that the market will have corrected this inefficiency. The era of accepting negative margins as a cost of entry will end, replaced by partnership models that prioritise mutual profitability and consumer value.”

Niemann, however brings the notion crashing back down to Earth with a bump. On the industry’s inner workings that may be resigned, he pointed out: “Honestly? Unfortunately, nothing. Let’s be realistic here. Most travel retail contracts run until 2030 or close to it, so structurally the model barely moves in that window.

“A revolution by 2030 is highly connected to the concession terms, and those cycles are moving too slow. What should change, and what I hope changes, is the assortment. It has to adjust to a new generation of consumers with completely different expectations, and the industry is heavily underestimating how fast that shift is coming. The contracts are locked. The customer isn’t.”

From L-R: Aude Bourdier, Founder & CEO, AMB Futureproof; Adrian Hayes, Founder & Independent Travel Retail Strategist, Cortex TR; Lennard Niemann, Managing Director Gharage Ventures; and Thomas Kaneko Henningsen, Partner, Blueprint.

What are industry leaders underestimating right now?

Top of mind for Blueprint’s Henningsen is that, as customer-centric community, travel retail is realising that yesterday’s success models will have much less impact in the coming 25 years.

“Blueprint’s own forecast based on ACI World data published in 2025 sees revenue per airport traveller in Europe continuing to drop over the coming years, which strengthens the sense of urgency; it is time to redefine what makes travel retail relevant,” he explained. “Today’s travel retail playbook needs to be re-written because megatrends like Gen Z, AI, experiential, social commerce, conscious consumerism and geopolitics are transforming travel retail (and the world). The travel retail community is underestimating how fundamentally traveller expectations are changing, particularly among younger generations. Younger travellers are growing up in a world shaped by geopolitics, community uprising, social media algorithms and hyper-personalised consumption unlocked by smartphones functioning as part global marketplace and part news media platform.”

For Hayes what’s being underestimated is the commercial power of a human touchpoint who genuinely understands their customer. “We’re investing in bigger stores, louder marketing, and more data. Meanwhile, one person who notices, cares, and remembers can turn a casual browser into an engaged customer with significantly higher spend,” he said. “Recent m1nd-set data shows that staff influence on purchase decisions among business travellers reaches 80% – and nearly a third changed what they bought entirely following staff interaction. The opportunity is clear: sales staff need to evolve into hosts. That passenger who feels genuinely welcomed leaves as an ambassador, sharing that experience with others long after they’ve left the store. Industry leaders are underestimating the ROI of emotional intelligence applied operationally.”

What will consumers refuse to tolerate in airport shopping by 2030?

The mainstream is the simple answer from Gharage Ventures’ Neimann: “The same five fragrances, the same liquor wall, the same promotions you’d find in any terminal on any continent. Travellers will have no patience left for generic, mass-market sameness dressed up as ‘exclusive’. If it could be anywhere, it might as well be nowhere.”

Furthermore, ‘value exploitation’ is – or should be – on the way out, in Bourdier’s view.

“Consumers do not like to make bad deals, no one does, in any circumstances, in domestic and in GTR alike. The ‘captive audience’ mentality, where retailers leverage location to charge exorbitant prices for goods, will no longer be acceptable – I recently paid an outrageous €5 for a single plain banana in a large hub airport,” she pointed out. “Today’s traveller is informed and compares prices instantly; realising one has been ‘ripped off’ at a hub destroys trust. By 2030, tolerance for price gouging will hit zero. The airport environment must shift from extraction to reward, where the consumer feels really valued for their presence, not penalised by it.”

The futuristic-looking Gentle Monster fashion eyewear store with Lotte Duty Free at Kansai Airport, Japan.

The benefit of hindsight

To summarise our future-gazing we also asked each of our contributors to tell us what prediction they think they would have got completely wrong if we were to revisit the questions in this feature again in 2030. For Hayes the answer was underestimating how quickly organisations can move and adapt when they commit to this shift.

“The winners won’t just move fast – they’ll move at the right moment and adjust as they go. Those who hesitate will fall further behind than I expect,” he said. “Ultimately this will be survival of the fittest — and fitness in travel retail will be defined by the ability to read your customer, adapt your model, and lead with humanity rather than just efficiency. The gap between those who do and those who don’t will be wider and harder to close.”

Niemann referenced the timing on the rise of retail media. “I’m betting it becomes a serious growth engine,” he revealed. “I might be early, and it takes longer to mature than I think. And the thing I’m most likely underestimating is how much the outside world rewrites the script: geopolitics, a shift in where Chinese travellers go, an economic shock. Those forces move faster than any trend we map in a room, and they’ll make some of my confident answers here look pretty naive.”

As Bourdier underscored: “We need to be humble about any predictions. What I offer today are not predictions, but merely informed hypotheses and own thoughts. The true skill for 2030 will not be predicting the future perfectly but having the agility to pivot when reality inevitably diverges from our best-laid plans.”

The final word comes from Henningsen who admitted: “I sincerely hope that I am wrong about three predictions; the next global pandemic, new world order replacing old world order, and that revenue per traveller continues to decline. I want to remain an optimist, but it seems to me that the world is in a state of flux; constant and rapid change has become the new standard. The travel retail marketplace is not isolated from this and it is not known for being fast at adapting to global change. From that perspective maybe the biggest risk we all face is travel retail’s attachment to yesterday’s success models. Because the inconvenient prediction is that the travel retail marketplace may change more in the next five years than it has in the previous 25 – are we ready for this?”

This feature first appeared in the June 2026 issue of TRBusiness magazine. Click here to read. 

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