As they reduce their dependency on airline fees in favour of non-aeronautical sources of revenue, airports are becoming increasingly reliant on retail and F&B sales to boost their balance sheets.
However, to ensure that they continue to reap the rewards of this strategically important source of income in the future, airports will need to strive to improve their performance and optimise the manner in which they manage their concessions.
With this in mind, it is surprising to learn that most airports still don’t do their own commercial research and/or leave the management of retail operations up to concessionaires.
The lack of research and knowledge on passenger needs is reflected by the current opinion passengers have of airport retail. Satisfaction levels with airport F&B and shopping ranked 29th and 30th respectively out of the 34 service items covered in ACI’s 2011 Airport Service Quality (ASQ) Survey.
Furthermore, the survey results indicate that on average only 70% of passengers are even aware of an airport’s commercial outlets (restaurants & shops).
So there is still room for improvement and airports wanting to maximise the potential of their retail offering need to implement research in order to better understand who their passengers are, what they want and how to provide it to them as efficiently as possible.
ASQ Retail, the new commercial benchmark offered as part of the Airport Service Quality initiative, was launched in 2012 to help airports answer these questions.
Currently Dubai, Delhi, Oslo, Montréal–Trudeau, Tampa and nine other airports from Europe, Asia and North America take part. ASQ Retail aims to help airports improve their commercial offering by benchmarking passenger satisfaction levels, sales performance, KPIs and consumer purchasing patterns.
So after one year, what has ASQ Retail taught us about how passengers are shopping at airports worldwide, and how are airports using this knowledge to improve their retail offering?
Here are four key findings that will help you improve the performance of your commercial outlets: