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Paris - Luxury brands are stepping up the battle for travelling shoppers with more outlets at airports and on cruise ships, tapping into one of the fastest growing sections of the market that looks set to keep booming thanks to soaring numbers of Asian tourists.
Revenues from travel retail, which also includes sales on airplanes, rose 9.4% in 2012 to nearly $77bn according to a market study by Generation Research.
It should reach $90bn this year and nearly double in size by 2020, the study forecast.
Boutique
"This channel is becoming very important," said Bruno Pavlovsky, chairperson of Chanel's fashion business.
"Customers are spending time in airports where the environment has become increasingly sophisticated."
The French luxury brand, the world's second-biggest behind Louis Vuitton by sales, has boutiques in four Asian airports and one at London's Heathrow. It will open a boutique in Paris Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport and another in Dubai next year.
Kering's Gucci, which like mega-brand rival Louis Vuitton has suffered a slowdown in the past two years partly due to emerging market shoppers' growing preference for logo-free products, has opened boutiques in the same locations recently.
Tourism spending is up 12% worldwide since January while spending by Chinese tourists in Europe is up closer to 20%, according to data from tax-refund company Global Blue.
Chinese tourists, who barely featured in luxury brands' customer statistics a little over a decade ago, now make up 29% of global luxury spending, consultancy Bain & Co said in a report published this week.
Luxury shoppers
That trend is set to continue, with Boston Consulting Group forecasting nearly half of all air traffic in the medium term will come from the Asia Pacific versus 37% now.
Though most luxury brands raised prices, particularly in the euro zone and in Japan, to make up for currency moves, Bain estimates that over two thirds of luxury spending by mainland Chinese was made overseas in 2013, due partly to local duties.
According to Renaissance Capital, Europe remains the cheapest market for handbags with prices about 9% below those in Hong Kong and 28% below mainland China, while the yen's weakness has played in favour of luxury shoppers in Japan.
BCG expects the Chinese travel market will grow at a compound annual rate of about 11% from 2012 to 2030.
Chinese urban travellers took about 500 million domestic and outbound trips in 2012, spending about $260bn and it expects those numbers to increase to 1.7 billion trips and $1.8trn in spending by 2030.
