Travel retail boutique agency 2.0 & Partners has partnered with Venice Marco Polo Airport to roll out its Strategic Mystery Shopping service, designed to analyse real-time shopper experiences across travel retail environments.
Developed to address the evolving demands across the channel, the programme focuses on qualitative observation of live interactions across retail and F&B touchpoints. It provides airport partners with deeper insights into service delivery, customer engagement and operational performance.
The agency highlighted a shift towards a more premium, international and operationally complex landscape, noting that understanding what happens on the shop floor has become increasingly critical.
It added that traditional customer feedback tools often fail to capture the nuances of real interactions, particularly in environments shaped by time pressure, diverse passenger profiles and operational constraints.
Beyond service measurement, the programme is intended to produce actionable insights.
It provides detailed reporting that allows users to delve into specific operational and behavioural themes, identifying areas for improvement while supporting insight-led training to enhance frontline performance.
All Strategic Mystery Shopping visits are also carried out by experienced retail and F&B professionals, trained specifically in the dynamics of travel retail and customer service behaviours to provide consistent and relevant observations.
The Strategic Mystery Shopping methodology replaces rigid, checklist-based assessments with qualitative observation of real behaviours and interactions, tailored to travel retail. This enables deeper insight into the factors that influence shopper perception, engagement and conversion.
2.0 & Partners Head of CXM Erika Giannini said: “Airports today operate in increasingly complex commercial environments. Understanding the real experience of travellers in-store and across the airport journey is essential if we want to elevate service standards.
“Strategic Mystery Shopping is designed to move beyond generic measurement and provide partners with meaningful insights that can support better training, better planning and stronger frontline execution.”
The partnership with Venice Marco Polo Airport extends the Strategic Mystery Shopping programme’s airport footprint, highlighting a growing shift towards insight-led approaches to ensure consistent service delivery.
As a core component of 2.0 & Partners’ CXM (Customer eXperience Management) offering, the programme reflects the company’s Measure. Train. Coach. philosophy, using real operational insight as the foundation for continuous improvement in frontline performance. ✈
