EUROPE. The European Travel Retail Confederation today released the ETRC Business Performance Index for the year 2022. Among the key findings – compiled by Pi Insight – is that retail revenues across European airports for the year rebounded to 83.3% of pre-pandemic 2019 levels and grew +108% year-on-year.
This represents a significant improvement on the numbers reported for 2020 and 2021, when revenues reached 27.1% and 40% of the 2019 level respectively.
Encouragingly, the business performance for the last quarter surpassed the full-year performance, with Q4 2022 airport retail sales reaching 91% of sales recorded during the same period in 2019.
2022 revenues are ahead of passenger recovery at European airports, which stood at 79.9% of 2019 numbers, according to data contributed to the Index by travel analyst ForwardKeys.
The Index shows that individual airport retail categories have posted varying rates of recovery with all being back to growth compared to 2021. ETRC noted that value sales continue to recover quicker than unit sales, driven by a continued increase in average sales prices across the majority of categories.
Spend per passenger remained at a higher level than in 2019 (+4%). However, there was a decrease against 2021 of -5%.
ETRC Secretary General Julie Lassaigne said: “After incredibly difficult years, it is heartening to see a notable improvement for our industry last year. The recovery trend indicates that 2023 should see business performance close to pre-pandemic levels but the impact of the current inflationary environment calls for caution.”
The full ETRC Business Performance Index and report is available to ETRC members only as an exclusive service. 
