Travel retail specialists 2.0 & Partners have announced a new partnership with Venice Marco Polo Airport to implement their Strategic Mystery Shopping programme, designed specifically for the complexities of the travel retail environment.
As airport retail environments become more premium, international and operationally demanding, understanding what is truly happening on the shop floor has never been more critical. Traditional customer feedback tools often fail to capture the nuances of real interactions, particularly in environments where time pressure, diverse passenger profiles and operational constraints shape the traveller journey.
Strategic Mystery Shopping from 2.0 & Partners has been developed to address this challenge. Created specifically for travel retail, the programme focuses on qualitative observation of real interactions across Retail and F&B environments, providing airport partners with deeper insight into service delivery, customer engagement and operational performance.
The programme is designed not simply to measure service, but to generate actionable intelligence. Through detailed reporting and the ability to drill down into specific operational or behavioural themes, the programme highlights areas for improvement while building a foundation for insight-led training that can elevate frontline performance.
A key element of the approach is the expertise of the assessors themselves. All Strategic Mystery Shopping visits are conducted by professionals with direct retail and F&B backgrounds. Before entering the field, mystery shoppers undergo dedicated training on travel retail dynamics and service behaviours, ensuring observations are consistent, relevant and rooted in operational understanding.
Unlike traditional mystery shopping programmes built around rigid checklists, the Strategic Mystery Shopping methodology emphasises qualitative observation of real behaviours and interactions, tailored to the travel retail sector. This approach allows the programme to capture the factors that genuinely influence shopper perception, engagement and conversion.
Erika Giannini, Head of CXM, 2.0 & Partners said: “Airports today operate in increasingly complex commercial environments. Understanding the real experience of travellers in-store and across the airport journey is essential if we want to elevate service standards. Strategic Mystery Shopping is designed to move beyond generic measurement and provide partners with meaningful insights that can support better training, better planning and stronger frontline execution.”
With this partnership, Venice Marco Polo Airport becomes the latest airport to adopt the Strategic Mystery Shopping framework, reinforcing the growing recognition across the sector that insight-led approaches are essential to deliver consistent service excellence.
Strategic Mystery Shopping forms part of the 2.0 & Partners CXM (Customer eXperience Management) business suite and supports the company’s wider philosophy of Measure. Train. Coach., where real operational insight becomes the foundation for continuous improvement in frontline performance.
Strategic Mystery Shopping. Don’t guess it. Track it.
