L’Oréal Travel Retail President Emmanuel Goulin tells BW Confidential why he remains optimistic about the future of travel retail, despite recent crises, and reveals his strategy for getting travelers off their phones and into airport stores and buying
The travel retail market continues to be complex, with the channel in Asia still down in the high teens. It’s no secret that the travel-retail market has been hit hard in recent years, first by Covid and then by a crackdown on daigou (the re-seller market) sales in China and Korea. While most companies say they welcome a return to real retail, rather than daigou, the impact has been difficult to bear for many. In addition, overall, while passenger numbers have bounced back, sales have not—travelers are shopping differently, and Gen Z are proving elusive.
All this has seen L’Oréal call for a reset in the channel focused on delivering interesting experiences rather than processing transactions. And it is not just talk. At the TFWA Asia Pacific show in Singapore in May, the group showcased an impressive new vision of travel retail over its 510m2booth. The theme was ‘shopper-tainment’, which L’Oréal says is about making airports and travel-retail stores a place of excitement. It featured a string of concepts, from quick-fix beauty services and Skin Mist Pods, offering a mist treatment using steam technology that can be customized by climate and skin type, to a cocoon for facials, fragrance inspired cocktails and men’s barber services served with a whiskey.
The group has also rolled out a number of such activations in the market, such as its YSL Beauty Light Club in Sanya, Hainan and in Singapore, with a nightclub atmosphere and featuring a silent disco fragrance finder, a fragrance bar, AI DJ turntables and a powder room. Another example is the group’s partnership with drinks company Pernod Ricard to create a bar-inspired outpost at Suvarnabhumi Airport in August, whereby guests could have complimentary cocktails inspired by the scent notes of the L’Oréal Paris Men Expert Age Protect line.
Central to many of these new initiatives is breaking down silos and reinventing the stakeholder ecosystem to create what L’Oréal calls a pentarchy model, which involves retailers, airports, brands, media and technology companies at all stages of the traveler journey—pre-trip, in-trip and post-trip.
L’Oreal Travel Retail President Emmanuel Goulin sees such initiatives as key to attracting travelers to stores, but also as offering a point of difference to what can be found in other channels, and making price comparisons with e-commerce players a lot more difficult.
What has been the impact of US tariffs and overall geopolitical uncertainty on the travel retail channel?
The market has been fluctuating quite a lot as a result of the geopolitical situation. Yet, what I see overall is that the market remains quite dynamic in airports, because the appetite for travel is there and the number of travelers keeps growing. There were 3.7 billion international travelers last year, and international traffic was +7% in the first half, and I foresee it keeping at least the same momentum in the second half—and beyond. When I look at the perspective for the future, the infrastructure that is being built, the aircraft being bought by airlines, it shows that the appetite for travel will continue to grow, which makes me very confident for the future. [Rather than an impact on spend], what we have seen so far is more an increase or decline of traffic in certain areas based on events. For instance, in June we saw a huge drop in traffic in the Middle East for obvious reasons. So we see impacts due to the geopolitical situation. Beyond that, the appetite for travel is strong everywhere, and the trends for travel from Americans and the Chinese to Europe were very strong during the summer.
But even though traffic is growing, passengers are not going to travel-retail stores or buying as much.
First, there are two realities. You have on the one side, the airport, with pretty strong traffic, and the market is following the traffic, although sometimes slightly below. Then you have downtown, where because people are traveling more on their own and less in group tours, it’s becoming more difficult to bring in the traffic. When you look at the two combined, yes indeed, we have seen an inverse correlation of the traffic curve and the business curve since 2022.
But as far as airports are concerned, in view of the difficulties over the past three years the issue is to reinvent ourselves to be less transactional and more emotional. We are trying to shift travelers from a screen mode, which is how they are when navigating an airport, to a feel mode. It’s up to us to try to bring more experience to the airport and to make it a better place to shop.
One of our KPIs is in the near future to ensure that passengers will go to the airport in advance precisely to shop. Yes, there is tension between traffic and conversion, but there is an opportunity to reinvent the model and to embark the whole ecosystem on that, and this is our approach at L’Oreal. It is not only to leverage our brands, but also to bring in the ecosystem of travel, meaning not only the retailers, but the airports, the airlines, the digital ecosystem that gravitates around that, and eventually, some leaders in other product categories.
For example, we are doing initiatives with [drinks company] Pernod Ricard and [board game] Monopoly to try to reinvent the experience in the airport. We have an event in Singapore Airport called the Beauty Light Club by Yves Saint Laurent and are concurrently implementing it with different players in Buenos Aires. So we can scale these initiatives. I’m confident that by reinventing the experience in the airport that we will change that perception of buying in duty free.
How difficult is it to bring retail partners and other players in the ecosystem onboard for this reset?
We initiated this move a year ago, and since then, we’ve been able to make it happen in nearly all continents. It’s triggering a positive energy that is bringing new ideas to the table. The idea is to break the silos and leverage the data that this industry is able to use so we can change the way we address the needs of passengers and make their experience more exciting than they could ever have in another ecosystem or in their local market. In that sense, we’re still in a test-and-learn mode, but we are starting to scale.
The need for data sharing has been talked about for some time. Is there finally some progress being made in this area?
The idea is to show that by activating the entire ecosystem and leveraging the data to the benefit of the passenger experience, we can create value together. The point is not to own the data, but to share it in a way that will help personalize the experience. A passenger that is feeling an emotion and having an experience will spend more time, and eventually more money in the airport.
Travel retail’s share of the business has shrunk at many groups. Will it be smaller for L’Oréal than in the past?
We cannot communicate on the share of the business. You have to look at this within a time frame. It is obvious that the travel-retail industry has been going through tough times over the past three years, including in 2025, with a market that has been, or is negative, mainly due to the restructuring of the downtown business and the difficulties of the Chinese ecosystem.
Yet, if you look at it over a longer time frame, over the past 10 years, the share of travel retail has increased within the beauty industry for all. The current difficulties don’t mean there are structural difficulties for the future. There were 3.7 billion travelers last year, which was a record high and is above pre-Covid.
We are confident there will be billions of passengers to come in the next years. Also, for passengers, who are living increasingly in a digitalized local market, to have this opportunity of a physical encounter with our brands in travel retail is meaningful. It’s becoming difficult for passengers to be able to find a place where they have the offer they want under one roof with differentiated experiences, and I believe the airport will be able to do that.
Beauty Light Club animation, its Café de la Rose for Lancôme in Doha airport, and
through providing services like the Lancôme Absolue
Longevity Clinic
Given steep discounts online, especially in China, what is the incentive to buy in travel retail?
The travel-retail industry was very transactional in the past. But now with the digital world, it can also bring some other things to the table, and emotions are part of it. Around 85% of travelers are looking for things that are meaningful to the destination they are visiting, so sense of place is quite unique to travel retail and we aim to develop it.
Gifting is another aspect. Roughly between a quarter and one third of the products sold in travel retail for beauty are travel-retail exclusives or travel-retail sets. Many of them are gifting opportunities and this is unique to travel retail too. This is an offer that we’ve been revamping to make it more experiential.
Another example is the sense of service. For the relaunch of Lancôme’s Génifique Ultimate, we had the first AI-generated beauty consultant to give personalized advice depending on where you travel, the length of your flight and on the weather forecast. Again, we are leveraging the very specific moment of travel.
It is no longer about necessarily having the best price, because online pure players will always be competitive, but the fair price and the differentiated experience. If we do that, there is no reason why we can’t keep leveraging the growth of the traffic and turn it into a fantastic business.
But will travelers have these experiences, but end up purchasing on TikTok Shop or online as it is cheaper?
I’m not sure of that. As long as you have the right offer at the right moment you will probably want to buy it or need to bring a gift. Impulse buying is +10% compared with 2019, which shows that when you want something, you buy it. Also, you have the service, with personalization and gift wrapping that you probably won’t have online.
Price competitiveness will always be a key topic. Having said that, I want to point out that retailers are free to set their own prices and within that our job is to make sure we have a fair price. If we want to make travel retail a destination, if we want travelers to go to the airport 15 minutes earlier to shop, they need to be convinced they will have a fair price—not necessarily the best price, but a fair price—that’s our battle.
There is a perception that travel retail is too expensive. Is this true and does the industry needs to work on this?
Possibly, because it’s true that many new travelers are coming—Gen Z, consumers from emerging countries—and they probably have a different purchasing power from previous generations. But our answer to that is to fully leverage L’Oréal’s portfolio of brands. The beauty offer in an airport is still very luxurious, and it’s true that below a certain threshold it is difficult to find affordable products.
Asia Pacific has been a challenge. How do you see it, especially as Chinese are not buying like they used to?
It’s true the Chinese ecosystem has been, and still is, a bit shaky, and this has affected the business’ results in Asia over the past two-to-three years. Yet, I’m confident, because I see that the airport business in Asia is growing. It means that fundamentally the situation of rising traffic and people starting to buy again in airports is happening.
The problem with Asia is that it became too dependent on the downtown channel, which has been shrinking. There is a re-balancing between the restructuring of downtown and the rise in airports in Asia. Korea is really struggling, with some of the big players closing some of their downtown stores. But Korea remains very attractive. Seoul was the number three airport worldwide in terms of international traffic last year, with 71 million passengers, and is growing in double digits this year.
The fundamentals of the industry are good—there is an appetite for travel, the airports are full, and the Chinese, Koreans and Thai are traveling. Some markets are buoyant in Asia, like Japan. So I’m confident that progressively the curves of downtown and airport will cross, and growth will come back to this region also.
How do you see the daigou situation—has it simply shifted from Hainan and Korea to elsewhere?
I cannot comment, but the daigou situation is intrinsically linked to the downtown restructuring over the past three years. The market is re-focusing on airports, which will be more sustainable in the long run.
Hainan has seen steep losses, how do you see that?
Hainan keeps its power of attraction—around 100 million or so Chinese visited Hainan last year, and 48 million in the first half of this year. What we need to address is that shopping was the number one reason that Chinese tourists traveled in the past and this has been shifting towards a quest for experiences. The Chinese who go to Hainan will not systematically visit the duty-free malls as before. Our job is to bring an experience so that the malls are worth visiting. We continue to invest in Hainan, and opened Aesop there last year.
Are the Chinese not buying due to discounting in the local market? Is there a risk that this discounting will undermine your efforts to create experiences?
Part of the growth in the Chinese ecosystem has come from the rise of online, with more pure player platforms, yet I remain confident that we are in an industry that is also about emotions, and where you need to touch, feel and smell. Chinese shoppers’ quest for travel is there.
The example of Aesop in Hainan and that Aesop will soon be present in Chinese airports is proving that we are creating this unique encounter between the shoppers and our brands, when it is becoming more rare or difficult in the local market to do so.
That’s also the vocation of travel retail: To be an opportunity to showcase our brands, to create this physical touchpoint, and that’s why, at the group level, we still consider travel retail as a very important channel. So, yes, there will be probably more platforms, but in the end, the more the business will become digital, the more the travel retail offer becomes relevant, because it will become a fantastic shopping temple at the airport and one that will no longer exist in many local markets.
There will be probably more [e-commerce] platforms, but in the end, the more the business will become digital, the more the travel retail offer becomes relevant, because it will become a fantastic shopping temple at the airport and one that will no longer exist in many local markets
L’Oréal Travel Retail President Emmanuel Goulin
Coming out of all these crises, do you think beauty retail in airports will be radically different in the next five years?
Yes, it will be very different. It will be far less siloed, because the experience will not be limited to beauty. For example, we launched the Café de la Rose for Lancôme in Doha airport, which leverages the gourmandise of the fragrance and the appetite of the pastries and the coffee; this goes beyond the traditional beauty universe.
I’m also convinced that technology will radically change the beauty experience. When we start using AI-generated DJs to discover the new look for Yves Saint Laurent, we are expanding the reach of beauty. And tomorrow with data and digital, we will be able to expand the playground of beauty in travel retail by not limiting it to the dwell time, but by providing the opportunity of a touchpoint with consumers. This is creating opportunities that go far beyond the limitations we have today of a reduced number of square meters in an airport.
How do you see the development of hybrid stores with F&B?
We tried initiatives this summer with Pernod Ricard in Thailand with L’Oreal Paris on Men Expert because we believe we need to go and talk to male passengers where they are. There is no taboo for me about that. The idea is to make sure the airport becomes a destination —whether I sell my Men Expert product next to the alcohol spaces or within beauty doesn’t matter. I’m also happy now to see some retailers having not only a vision of pure beauty or duty-free categories, but having a foot in food and beverage, because it means that together we get a bigger share of the passenger ‘s time.