Celebrate Your World

"Celebrate Your World". This is the overarching theme of the campaign, which the Global Marketing team has launched for the period from March to October, which brings together a series of mini-campaigns throughout the peak season.

And although we will go into the details of this bold campaign later, I would like to highlight the central word chosen to name the campaign: celebrate.

The 2020 summer campaign was short, but intense. We saw the lifting of travel restrictions well into the summer campaign, once progress was made with Covid vaccinations and the necessary mechanisms were put in place to facilitate mobility (the so-called Covid Passport). The result: a late, high-intensity campaign, which, in some destinations, especially in the Mediterranean basin, extended well into the fourth quarter of the year.

In certain geographies, the first months of 2022 have shown an almost total recovery of 2019 traffic volumes – with some destinations far exceeding that mark. And while it is too early to predict a recovery in the sector, we can face the coming months with a real sense of optimism.

First Quarter 2022

The sales performance of the Group during Q1 was driven by significant progress across EMEA and positive contributions from the Americas, especially the US and Central America & Caribbean. Over 1,960 shops were open globally by the end of March 2022, representing around 85% of stores and more than 90% of the 2019 sales potential.

If we go into the details of each of the regions, we can draw a number of conclusions: there is an appetite for travel and the return of passengers to airports bodes well for the return of our business to pre-2019 levels.

Time to put out the flags?

Realistically, the moment to uncork the bottles to toast the recovery has not yet arrived. Without wishing to sound a negative note, we still have a long way to go for the full recovery of our sector.

The latest data from IATA (March 2022) reveals that the airline industry will not manage to surpass pre-crisis passenger figures until 2024, a year in which they expect to add 4 billion travelers (103% of the 2019 total). Thus, they forecast that the total number of travelers to improve to 83% in 2022, to 94% in 2023, to 103% in 2024 and to 111% in 2025.

It is also true that this traffic recovery is not being – nor is it expected to be – uniform, as it will depend on customs regime and local travel regimes. Thus, as we saw the U.S. domestic market take off early as 2021, we are witnessing a similar phenomenon in Western Europe this year.

The latest news from some Asian countries about the lifting of restrictive measures, especially in China, point to a return of this very important market – hopefully soon – and its positive impact on many locations where the passenger profile (especially Chinese) has a greater weight.

Ready for the comeback

We have always been ready to welcome back customers, but now even more so. As you can read in this issue of the magazine, we are continuing to upgrade and refurbish our stores to provide attractive shopping spaces for our customers. We have also managed to increase our selling space with new stores and airports and to extend contracts in key concessions for our business.

Our colleagues in the Commercial team are working with the brands and we are now seeing more frequent exclusive launches, new products and new assortments... something we had missed and which is finally coming back more strongly.

And of course Marketing – with whom we wrote this article – are also part of this. Under the name of Celebrate Your World, a series of campaigns have being orchestrated bringing additional energy to our stores. The Celebrate your World campaign aims to reinvigorate the stores, by making them look more modern and appealing for a younger passenger demographic. With this in mind, we are leveraging some of our “marketing campaign best sellers” – including Summer Drinks Festival, Whisky Festival, and Summer fragances & Suncare – together with seasonal campaigns (Easter and Ramadan) and local tactical campaigns (like Celebrate Australian wines or Celebrate Spanish food). Campaign materials have been offered in a choice of three different color options, enabling an element of personalization for the stores, to suit the local passenger profile.

The campaign is completed with a comprehensive marketing communication package which includes in-store activities, signage, screen content, banners - and in some cases, even joint Dufry-airport initiatives – as well as online communications using Red By Dufry push notifications, social media and all kinds of online communication opportunities.