A week after Cannes, I find myself thinking less about the announcements and more about some of the contradictions that emerged during the week.
There was plenty of discussion this year about AI, connected travellers, data, personalisation, new retail formats, immersive experiences and the increasingly sophisticated ways in which brands and operators can reach people before they even arrive at the airport.
All relevant. All necessary.
But one number keeps bringing me back to a much more basic question.
Retail revenue per passenger is still more than 20% below its pre-Covid level, despite passenger volumes having recovered strongly. Oliver Wyman’s research presented in Cannes tells a similar story. Passenger traffic is 7% above 2019, while duty free and travel retail sales remain slightly below it, leaving an estimated US$5 billion in unrealised sales compared with the performance implied by 2019 sales per passenger.
That is quite a gap.
And I am not convinced the answer lies simply in adding another technological layer to the journey.
The traveller, after all, does not appear to have lost interest in shopping.
Oliver Wyman found that 89% of travellers who browse airport retail have discovered or seriously considered a new brand or product there. Of those who discover something new, 44% buy immediately, with younger travellers even more responsive.
The appetite for discovery is clearly alive.
Kearney’s research adds another interesting piece to the puzzle. 68% of travellers said AI or social media had influenced what they considered buying on their last trip. Yet 64% of those who had used those tools to research Travel Retail subsequently walked past the airport stores without buying anything.
For me, that is one of the most interesting numbers to come out of Cannes.
Because it suggests that we may be getting better at generating consideration without necessarily getting better at converting it.
The connected traveller is already here.
They may know the product. They may have seen the campaign. They may have checked reviews, compared prices or arrived with a shortlist. Kearney also found that 73% of the most digitally engaged travellers continue to verify prices, reviews or product information once they reach the physical store.
Digital engagement therefore does not make the store less important.
It raises the expectation of what the store has to deliver.
The connected traveller may be arriving at a disconnected proposition.
And that proposition includes much more than technology.
It includes the assortment, the price, the visibility of the saving, the brands available, product availability, the knowledge and confidence of the staff, the ease of finding what you want and whether the customer sees a sufficiently good reason to buy now rather than later.
The fashion research presented during the week provides a useful category example of a much broader issue.
Only 9% of duty free buyers currently purchase fashion and accessories, compared with 12% before Covid. Yet when travellers actually visit the category, 61% convert into buyers and 80% of purchases are decided airside.
That does not look like a category with no appetite to buy.
The friction appears elsewhere.
Luggage space, fit and sizing, unclear price advantage, lack of time and limited range were among the most significant barriers identified. Satisfaction with store design and atmosphere reached 63%, but satisfaction with staff service was only 37%, availability of sizes 33% and prices 31%.
There was another finding that caught my attention.
Among fashion buyers, 44% of spend sits in premium, compared with 18% in luxury. At the same time, many airport fashion offers remain strongly concentrated at the luxury end, while traveller interest appears broader and increasingly relevant in the accessible premium segment.
That raises a question that goes well beyond fashion.
Are we always building the proposition around where demand is moving, or are we sometimes still building around the categories, brands and commercial structures we already know?
Every category has its own version of this.
We can create increasingly sophisticated campaigns around a spirits brand, but if the traveller cannot immediately understand why the airport offer is different or better, the sophistication upstream may not be enough.
We can create a spectacular beauty activation, but the final few metres still depend on availability, sampling, knowledgeable advice and a reason to transact.
We can improve digital targeting before the journey, but if the physical assortment feels predictable when the traveller arrives, we may simply have done a better job of directing attention towards something that is not sufficiently compelling.
And we can shorten security queues, improve passenger flows and create more dwell time, but that time does not automatically become retail time.
This is where I think the discussion needs to move from diagnosis to action.
The answer is not to slow down innovation.
It is to become more disciplined about where we apply it.
Before adding another digital layer, I would start by identifying where conversion is being lost today.
Is the customer entering the store but not finding the product?
Are they finding it but not understanding the value?
Is the assortment wrong for the passenger profile?
Is availability poor?
Is the customer interaction strong enough?
Are we creating discovery without giving the traveller a compelling reason to complete the purchase?
Those are not particularly glamorous questions, but they are commercial ones.
And increasingly, we have the data to answer them.
AI, better passenger analytics and more sophisticated CRM should help us identify those frictions much earlier. Mystery shopping and customer experience measurement should help us understand what happens during the interaction. Sales and conversion data should tell us where the problem becomes commercially significant.
The opportunity is to connect those tools rather than treating each one as an innovation project in isolation.
Cannes naturally celebrates new ideas. It should. An industry that stops innovating will quickly become irrelevant.
But innovation is most useful when it solves a clearly identified problem.
A new platform can be demonstrated. A new store concept can be photographed. An AI application can be presented. A spectacular activation can be launched.
Improving the fundamentals is often less visible.
It may mean changing the brand mix. Reconsidering an assortment. Making the price advantage genuinely clear. Improving stock availability. Training people better. Simplifying returns. Revisiting staffing at the right times of day. Giving the customer a more relevant reason to enter the store in the first place.
None of those may generate the same attention.
They can still generate more sales.
Sarah Branquinho made the point during the opening conference that more travellers do not necessarily mean more shoppers, and that traffic does not guarantee value.
That, for me, is where the solution starts.
We should stop treating traffic as the beginning of the answer and start treating conversion as the beginning of the question.
What prevented the traveller from buying?
What could we realistically change?
And which technology, data or operational intervention would make the biggest difference?
Innovation only creates value when it changes what the traveller finds, understands and experiences at the point of decision.
That is probably my main takeaway from Cannes this year.
I left encouraged by the amount of intelligence now entering our industry. We are understanding travellers better, collecting better data and developing tools that would have been difficult to imagine even a few years ago.
The next step, in my view, is to connect that intelligence more directly to execution.
Not less innovation.
More purposeful innovation.
Start with the friction. Understand why conversion is being lost. Fix what is already within our control. Then use technology to make the solution faster, smarter and more scalable.
Perhaps the most useful question after Cannes is therefore not what else we can add to the traveller journey.
It is what we already know needs fixing and whether we are prepared to fix it.
Marco Passoni has spent more than three decades in the travel retail industry, holding senior leadership roles across distribution, retail and business development. His career included 12 years as CEO of a leading international Duty Free distribution company and a further eight years managing a retail business operating mono-brand fashion boutiques across several international airports.
Today, as Senior Executive Vice President and founding partner of 2.0 & Partners, he develops new business opportunities and services for brands, operators and airports across the global travel retail market. Through 2.0 & Partners, he works with some of the world’s most recognised luxury and premium brands, as well as leading international airports, helping them assess opportunities, strengthen their travel retail presence and navigate the distinctive commercial dynamics of the airport environment. A former elite sailor and World Champion, Marco continues to spend much of his time airside, observing the industry first hand and helping partners and clients respond to the challenges and opportunities of an evolving market.