Auckland opened its new arrivals duty free store on 31st March. Previously Nuance and DFS both operated arrivals duty free stores in Auckland but in a somewhat controversial move, the airport chose to centralise the offering into a single walk-through store. The concern in some people’s minds was that two stores encouraged more price competition and a better quality offer. Personally I don’t agree with that. Time in arrivals is limited and nobody wants to waste time having to shop around. The simple reality is that if you have two stores with price guarantees then its not in either of their interest to try to differentiate on price. So with no price saving for the customer, all their get is a time wasting.
The overall idea of Auckland’s new walk through arrivals store is good. Its large (1600m2, making it the largest single arrivals space in the Southern Hemisphere), strongly branded with Maori and NZ imagery, and very easy to move through.
They’ve ensured that immigration is visible from the duty free store, another contentious issue. Some people believe its better if people can’t see the ever-present looming queue in immigration and if they can that they will be drawn to it. The other school of thought says that if they can see how long it is, they realise they may as well spend some time shopping rather than queuing.
Half the floorspace of the new store is dedicated to beauty featuring the fairly typical brand based displays.
The other half is made up of liquor, wine, tobacco & confectionery plus a range of electronics.
Liquor is strong, leveraging off the NZ allowance for 3 bottles of spirits and 6 bottles of wine. The walls carry branding for the likes of Smirnoff and there are large interactive screens showing featured promotions.
Sony have a dedicated listening hangout where customers can rest on couches while checking out new releases. There’s also another zone for Sony Playstation. This is one of the few occassions within an arrivals offering where we’ve seen an assumption that you can actually prolong dwell time in an arrivals store beyond the bare minimum.
Auckland have incentivised the launch with double airport promotions and have put in place a 10% discount on purchases if people purchase the maximum liquor allowance.
Images from MoodieReport
