AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND. Lagardère Travel Retail Pacific, has entered into an agreement with Sydney-based SkyBuys to trial the use of the latter’s expanding online duty free shopping platform.
The move is designed to address the challenges faced by Lagardère Travel Retail in the Pacific region resulting from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on travel. Lagardère Travel Retail has extensive retail operations in airports across Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia.
The SkyBuys app – which offers contactless transactions and payments – allows air passengers to shop duty free online prior to, or at any stage in their journey and collect their purchases in-store, without having to handle goods or wait in a queue.
The initial target for the new tie-up was the much-discussed trans-Tasman travel bubble, which has been hit with a setback in recent days when it was suspended for two months.
Along with other airports, the SkyBuys trial will include Auckland Airport, New Zealand’s major travel gateway. Pre-COVID, the airport processed over 11.5 million passengers in 2019, an increase of +2.2% on the previous year, with around 1.5 million passengers travelling the Sydney-Auckland route alone.
SkyBuys CEO Alec Kemmery said: “We are pleased to be working with Lagardère Travel Retail, a global leader in the travel retail industry to reimagine the travel retail experience for the modern traveller in the Pacific.”
Lagardère Travel Retail CEO Pacific Przemek Lesniak said that despite the continued challenges posed by COVID-19, developing strong partnerships and exploring new channels to enhance the customer experience is more important than ever.
He said: “We look forward to working with SkyBuys to provide more opportunities for customers to shop duty free when quarantine-free travel resumes and to complement our growing suite of digital offerings.”
SkyBuys has bolstered its team and sector knowledge in recent times with the hire of some experienced names from the travel retail industry. They include Philip Corne, ex-Chief Executive Officer Louis Vuitton Oceania; Georg Hinterleitner, ex-Moët Hennessy Director of Global Travel Retail Oceania; and Glyn Williams, ex-General Manager of Retail at Sydney Airport.
The SkyBuys concept was accelerated by global aviation group Airbus through the global aviation group’s innovation hub in Germany, where SkyBuys was also a finalist in the 2018 Lufthansa/SAP aviation technology challenge.
