Back in Business

The second part of June saw the long-awaited moment of pulling the shutters back in our stores after weeks of hard work preparing stores to accommodate a new way of working.

The implementation of the in-store Coronavirus protocol – which we already covered in the last issue of Dufry World – required relevant “store fitting” to ensure a safe and healthy environment for both customers and employees.

Reconfiguration of the tills, signaling, sanitizing points in the entry of the stores… and in many cases, even re-configuration of the store, were all necessary to accommodate the new reality. All these changes, implemented in record-time by our staff, were worth all the effort and we had the reward of seeing our stores back in business after several weeks (and months) of closing.

Re-openings

The excitement levels reached with the re-opening of our stores after this unprecedented situation are similar to those of the regular opening of a Dufry store – if not more! Dufry is reopening stores on an airport-by-airport basis in close coordination with landlords and following our internal shop-by-shop reopening plan. This allows us to manage expected sales generation and profitability of each single store, even within the same airport or other location.

As of end of July, 40% of Dufry stores were opened. That figure raised to 50% by August as more connections were reinstalled and travel restrictions eased. The criteria for the reopening of our stores follows an airport-by-airport approach, accommodating the commercial surface to passenger volumes. This also involves alignment of opening hours and shifts to passengers, flight schedules and passenger profiles. The 50% of shops reopened represents a sales capacity of 70% of the Group’s potential.

Customers responding well

Customers are getting back to our stores and their willingness to buy from our shelves has not faded. To the contrary, we are currently seeing an increase in the average spend per passenger, which is reassuring news and will hopefully indicate that our business can expect to make a markedcomeback when the situation returns to normal.

Product assortment, Dufry staff, and price and promotions are the key pillars driving customer satisfaction according to Dufry perception tracking carried out with more than 25,000 interviews in 50 countries in the second half of 2019.

Dufry can look to the future with moderate optimism as we can expect customers to continue duty-free shopping with us. Based on an online survey carried out with almost 1,150 contacts from Durfy´s customer data base in early summer 2020, 58% of our customers had a flight scheduled for 2020, and 76% of them were confident about finally making their flights. When it comes to passenger´s behavior patterns in the airport, the traveler attitude towards some airport services (food and beverage, vending machines, VIP lounges, etc.) seems to have changed. The only exception is duty-free shopping, with over 93% of the respondents acknowledging they are engaging the same or more than before.

The future

It is very difficult to predict how the last part of the year will perform; many factors around a cure – and a vaccine – for the Covid-19 disease will influence how the near future will look like. It´s also true that everyone, from governments to corporations and individuals, have learnt important lessons on how to handle this unprecedented situation.

There is still a long way ahead to recover the 2019 sales levels – industry forecasts talk about 2022 onwards. However, the first symptoms of activity recovery are encouraging, and so is the response of Dufry. The changes implemented have strengthened our company and given us more flexibility, thus putting Dufry on a better position for the recovery phase. Now it´s time to work on keeping morale high.