Everyone in travel retail is talking about pre-order. Airlines and airports alike. Book your flight, get an email, browse a catalog, buy before you leave. Sounds convenient. Sounds modern. Sounds like progress.
It is not.
Pre-order is the fastest way to turn travel retail into just another e-commerce site. And that is a battle you cannot win.
The exclusivity problem
Travel retail has always been built on exclusivity. Tax-free pricing. Limited editions. Products you could only get because you were traveling.
Pre-order destroys this.
When passengers can browse and buy from their couch three weeks before departure, what makes it travel retail? Nothing. It is just e-commerce with a longer delivery time.
Airlines launching pre-order platforms think they are competing with onboard catalogs or airport shops. They are not. They are competing with Amazon, with brand websites, with every online retailer on the planet. And they are competing on their terms, not yours.
Smaller selection. Slower delivery. Less competitive pricing. That is not a winning position.
The numbers confirm this. In airports, only 37% of passengers enter duty-free shops. Of those, 53% buy something. Do the math: about 20% of travelers actually purchase. For inflight retail with traditional catalogs? Below 2%. Global travel retail revenue in 2024 reached $74 billion, but that is still 13% below 2019 levels.
Eight out of ten travelers walk past. In the air, it is 98 out of 100.
Pre-order does not solve this. It makes it worse by removing the only differentiator travel retail had left.
The magic we lost
I remember airports as a child. Duty-free felt like another world. Walkmans, cameras, gadgets that had not reached France yet. Perfumes in golden boxes. Electronics that felt like discoveries from the future.
That magic is gone. Today, anything in an airport shop or inflight catalog is two clicks away on Amazon. Same products. Often cheaper. Delivered to your door. The physical goods are no longer exclusive. They are commodities.
So travel retail tried to adapt with pre-order. If products are not exclusive, let us at least be convenient.
But convenience is not a differentiator. It is the minimum. And when you compete on convenience against Amazon, you lose.
The five pillars, and why pre-order breaks the first one
At SKYdeals, we built our shoppertainment e-commerce platform around five psychological levers that make travel retail work:
- Exclusivity: Deals only valid during your journey
- Contextual discovery: Offers tied to where you are right now
- Time pressure: Countdown timers create urgency
- Social dynamics: Fellow travelers become shopping partners
- Gamification: Auctions and games turn shopping into entertainment
Pre-order breaks the first pillar completely. And without exclusivity, the other four collapse.
No time pressure. Passengers have weeks to decide. No contextual discovery. They are on their couch. No social dynamics. They are alone. No gamification. It is just a catalog.
Pre-order removes everything that makes travel retail different from regular e-commerce.
Recreating exclusivity through the offer
If products are no longer exclusive, exclusivity must come from the offer itself.
FlyOver Deals: Not “buy this perfume.” Buy this perfume at 30% off, but only while flying over Germany, and only for the next 47 minutes. The offer is tied to geography and time. Miss the window, miss the deal.
Flying Auctions: Not “browse our catalog.” Join this live auction happening right now on your flight, competing against 200 other passengers for a single item. The thrill of competition turns passive browsing into active engagement.
Group Buying: Not “shop before you travel.” Unlock this group deal by getting five strangers in the terminal to join in the next hour. Social dynamics create urgency and connection.
Flash Sales: Countdown timers that create real scarcity. Not artificial “limited time offers” that run for months. Real deadlines tied to your journey.
The window of exclusivity is no longer geographic. It is temporal. It is contextual. It is social.
This is shoppertainment e-commerce. And it only works when you are actually traveling.
The real question
Pre-order asks: “How do we make travel retail more like regular e-commerce?”
Wrong question.
The right question is: “How do we build an e-commerce experience impossible to replicate anywhere else?”
The answer is not convenience. It is experience. The thrill of a deal that exists only here, only now, only for you and the people around you.
That is what travel retail was always supposed to be. Pre-order is not the future. It is surrender.
Bringing the magic back
We built SKYdeals to solve this problem. Our shoppertainment e-commerce platform creates exclusivity not through products, but through moments.
Currently deployed with Lufthansa Group (170+ aircraft), Etihad Airways, and La Compagnie, reaching 88,000 passengers daily. The results speak for themselves: 3 to 5 times higher conversion rates compared to traditional travel retail.
Because when shopping becomes entertainment, passengers actually want to shop.
Ready to transform your travel retail strategy? Contact us for a demo
