▶️  OVER TO YOU – LIVE: The behaviour of travelling shoppers is changing faster than the industry serving them and keeping pace requires industry-wide transformation, according to Blueprint Partner Thomas Kaneko Henningsen.

In what he describes as a ‘wake up call’ for the travel retail industry, the seasoned industry executive delivered a 15-minute talk at the 2026 TR Consumer Forum in Geneva outlining how airports, operators and brands must reinvent experiences, partnerships and value capture the coming years – or risk losing relevance.

His remarks were inspired by Blueprint’s new whitepaper titled Inconvenient Predictions, which was released in June following an 18-month development period.

This examines how commercial experiences are evolving and what airports, operators and brands can do to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world.

It combines future-focused insights, industry analysis and case studies to help identify how the travel retail marketplace is changing and provide practical recommendations for implementation, with the findings based on published data, interviews with industry experts and Blueprint’s experience advising more than 70 travel retail companies across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and North America since 2016.

“The risk facing travel retail is the attachment to yesterday’s success model,” said Henningsen. “The current model deserves credit for being highly resilient. But I truly believe that the industry’s biggest commercial opportunity the coming years is to stay relevant and that will require transformation.”

Over to You – Live is an in-person iteration of TRBusiness’ popular Over to You op-ed magazine column of the same name. For those who couldn’t make this year’s Forum, Henningsen’s session is now available to stream on demand – simply hit play on the video below…

To find out more about the TR Consumer Forum, please visit TRConsumerForum.com. Please click here to register your interest for the 2027 edition.

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