US. Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport has awarded its concourse E duty free contract to a partnership between Duty Free Air & Ship Supply (DFASS) of Miami and Atlanta-based Franklin & Wilson Airport Concessions.
DFASS president Benny Klepach confirmed the award. “It’s a great airport and we’re very excited by it,” he told The Moodie Report. “It’s a single store with more than +70% space than existed before.”
Klepach said the opening fitted perfectly into the company’s new expansion phase. “We’re aggressively targeting the airports for the next stage of our development,” he said.
To achieve that, DFASS has created a new airports division called DFASS Travel Retail (DTR) and will be apponting an executive to head it within the next 30 days.
“We’re planning at least 25 new airport stores over the next 18-24 months,” Klepach said. “But we’re going to be very selective. It has to make financial sense, have good demographics and good passenger outflow.”
Those stores will be either duty free or duty paid, depending on the specific business and where the vendors [brand houses] permit duty paid business. “We’re viewing it very much as travel retail business in the European sense,” said Klepach. “Post-security is the benchmark [for us to operate] – it’s the imaginary point of no return.”
DFASS will run generic stores as well as in-line outlets [specialist standalone stores in partnership with individual suppliers].
DFASS, a long time specialist in the inflight retail and supply sector, has been steadily growing its business in the airport channel. It already runs an Estée Lauder store in Hartsfield’s Concourse A, which it operates with Franklin & Wilson. And in July, L’Oréal Paris and DTR officially opened its first North American airport boutique at Las Vegas McCarran airport.
The shop in concourse E has been operated by HMSHost Corp on a month-to-month basis since its contract expired in 1999. Franklin & Wilson has five other stores at Hartsfield, including two Body Shop outlets.
