Are we spending more on airport duty free?

Manchester Airport recently announced a £35m upgrade for Terminal 1 to create one of the UK's largest airside shopping facilities, the centre piece of which will be a 25,000 square foot tax and duty free store.

Manchester is not alone. Airports across Europe are investing heavily in swanky new retail facilities.

Does this mean we're all spending more money at the airport shops?

Well, not exactly. Evidence from the last 5 years suggests airport retail revenues grew by around 5% per year. During the same period passenger numbers also grew ... by around 5% per year.

In short (and let's ignore inflation for now), airport retail spend per passenger is alarmingly flat.

Yet, our own research* suggests passengers are interested in airport retail, particuarly tax and duty free shopping. 62% of the people we surveyed said they would willing to receive promotional offers from airport retailers.

So, if airport retailers want to get more people into their shops, maybe they need a more effective way of communicating with passengers ... to make individual passengers aware of specific offers that are relevant to their needs.

This was one of the reasons why we developed StreamThru.

* A survey of 2,887 passengers was undertaken for Mantic Point from 1st – 14th February 2007.

Stressed out business travellers

43% of business travellers say they start to feel stressed before they reach the airport, and 84% are annoyed by flight delays and cancellations says newwbusiness.co.uk reporting the findings of the American Express business travel ‘love and hates’ survey.

Sounds like these busy execs need StreamThru .... although we can't prevent delays and cancellations, we can certainly reduce stress levels by keeping business travellers updated with the status of their flight.

In fact, savvy business travellers have already taken advantage of StreamThru.

In our first 3 months of operation, 51% of journeys tracked were for business travel. The most popular destination was the UK, followed by France, Spain, and the USA. For the domestic UK flights, 70% of journeys tracked were for business purposes.

BA was the most popular airline with StreamThru business travellers, accounting for just under a quarter of journeys, followed by easyJet and BMI. And a massive 70% of easyJet flights and 72% of BMI flights registered with StreamThru were for business travel.

StreamThru: Top 5 Airlines for Business Travel

Jet2.com holiday-makers lapping up free flight information

Jet2.com passengers flying from Leeds Bradford and Manchester Airports can't get enough of the StreamThru free flight information service.

Although Jet2.com flew less than 2% of UK passengers in 2006, Jet2.com flights made up a whopping 8% of journeys tracked by StreamThru in our first 3 months of operation. 4 out of 5 of these passengers were leisure travellers, the majority of whom were travelling to Spain for a holiday.

We can only speculate as to the reason for this ... perhaps holiday-makers from the Leeds, Bradford, and Manchester areas simply want reassurance that their flight is on-time, or maybe they want to know that nothing is going to delay them from their San Miguel and Sangria?

StreamThru.com launched giving passengers free flight information straight to their mobile phone

The launch of http://www.streamthru.com/ comes at a time when departures from UK airports have rocketed to 180 million, with 25% of all air passengers facing flight delays.

To take some of the stress out of travelling, passengers can register for the new service and elect to receive confirmation of their flight number and flight times on the day of travel, as well as information on boarding times, departure gates and whether their flight is delayed and if so by how long.