Lotte Duty Free creates Star Lounge for VIP guests and steps up diversification effort : Moodie Davitt Report

Welcome to Korean duty free 2018-style

It’s a simple formula. The demand exists in China, it is fulfilled in Korea. Welcome to Korean travel retail 2018-style. It is like nothing you will see anywhere else. Click to read more from The Moodie Blog

SOUTH KOREA. Lotte Duty Free is opening a 1,200sq m VIP guest facility called Star Lounge on 17 May at its flagship downtown store in Myeong-dong, Seoul.

Managing Director Strategy & Planning Division JongHwan Lee* told The Moodie Davitt Report: “We will invite a lot of FIT guests and we will run regular brand and fashion shows with a lot of brands, such as Cartier and Tiffany.”

Guests will be offered refreshments and the chance to preview goods in the private area. “We will create a big and welcoming space for our guests to feel very comfortable and relaxed. It will be a very luxury area with high-quality services,” Lee said.

Star Lounge will be sited on the 14^th floor of Lotte Hotel’s new wing, which will be connected by escalator to the main department store and duty free building (the latter is housed on the ninth through 12^th floors).

In another important development, Lotte Duty Free has just created a new operation called the Big Market Team, charged with developing tourism and shoppers from other Asian nations. The team will target visitors from Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan and various Southeast Asian countries in order to diversify the company’s reliance on Chinese shoppers.

“Their role is developing visitors from other countries except China,” said Lee. “Currently the number of guests from those countries is quite small. Hence the name is Big Market Team – to create a big market!”

“We will create a big and welcoming space for our guests to feel very comfortable and relaxed. It will be a very luxury area with high-quality services,” says JH Lee, pictured during an interview with Martin Moodie in Seoul last week

Even with the THAAD-related collapse in Chinese tourism, Korea Tourism Organization’s accumulative visitor arrivals figures for the first two months of 2018 underline the country’s reliance on a single nationality. In 2016, pre-THAAD, Chinese accounted for one in every two visitors to South Korea. Source: Korea Tourism Organization

No decision yet on Incheon T1 re-bid

Lee said the company has not decided whether to submit an offer for the contracts at Incheon International Airport T1 it resigned earlier this year, when they are re-tendered in coming days. “We have to see the specific contents of the bidding,” he said.

*Footnote: Look out for the full interview with JH Lee in The Moodie Davitt Interactive & Print Edition, out in May.

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