ITALY. SAVE Group has appointed travel retail consultancy 2.0 & Partners to conduct a mystery shopping service at Venice Marco Polo Airport. The aim of the project is to improve the retail, food & beverage and services offer at Italy’s fourth-busiest airport by passenger traffic.
From this month, London-headquartered 2.0 & Partners will run the programme twice a month for a year. The project involves the review of all commercial outlets at the airport, including about 50 points-of-sale.
The initiative is designed to evaluate the commercial skills, attitudes and approaches that jointly create the passenger retail experience, 2.0 & Partners said. These will be measured against the standards Venice Marco Polo Airport is looking to uphold or exceed, it added.
2.0 & Partners Chief Executive Officer Fabio Bernardini said: “At the end of the programme, there will be a contest concerning all the aspects that were considered during the mystery shopping exercise.
“We will be focused on store visuals including merchandising, the fluidity of the sales process and nuances of travel selling, and the general customer experience. From all of these inputs we will select an overall winner.
“This process will allow us to constructively find weak points in the commercial offer and strengthen them. This could also be a starting point for training initiatives as one possible solution.”
The ‘mystery’ team of 2.0 & Partners is multi-ethnic and multicultural in nature and operates internationally with programmes tailored to specific travel retail environments.
SAVE Group is focused primarily on developing the infrastructures and route network of the Venice-Treviso airport system. In 2017 Venice processed more than 10 million passengers, making it the fourth busiest airport in Italy, while Treviso handled more than 3 million.
