UK. London Heathrow Airport this week announced it has confirmed landmark agreements with WHSmith and Lagardère Travel Retail following a strategic review of its travel essentials offer. WHSmith UK Travel CEO Andrew Harrison speaks to the Moodie Davitt Report Senior Business Editor Mark Lane about the strategy that has gained the retailer the opportunity to significantly expand its footprint at the UK’s number one travel hub.
For nearly 80 years, WHSmith has been a staple of the retail scene at Heathrow Airport whereby anyone using the famous London travel hub would expect to enter, or pass, one of the retailer’s stores.
That won’t be changing any time soon following Heathrow’s big retail contracts announcement this week. WHSmith is set to grow its estate at the airport to its largest-ever size having won the master travel essentials concession for terminals 3, 4 and 5, while also retaining three stores in Terminal 2.
Though the new contract lengths are undisclosed, the duration has been described as “a long-term agreement”.
The extended WHSmith footprint will include 20 essentials stores, four bookshops and seven InMotion shops (22 of the total are airside and nine landside).
Sharing his reaction on the contract news exclusively with The Moodie Davitt Report, WHSmith UK Travel CEO Andrew Harrison says: “This is a great next step in the long-term partnership between Heathrow and WHSmith. It means we continue to grow our business at Heathrow and it underlines that what we’ve been able to deliver for the airport on the travel essentials side, they like.
“We’re really pleased about the win for a number of reasons. The first is we were the pioneer of the one-stop-shop ‘blended essentials’ concept, and this strategic review [of travel essentials requirements] by Heathrow has absolutely backed that as the way forward.
“The second is, we are delighted to have secured terminals 3, 4 and 5 – we’ve secured the lion’s share of the travel essentials proposition, which is what we set out to do.
“Across the new stores we will become the main provider of health and beauty and pharmacy in these terminals for the first time.”
Health and beauty gains
From next year, WHSmith will take over the mantle of health and beauty leader across the three terminals from Boots, though the latter will continue to have an airside presence in T5.
WHSmith’s advances in the health and beauty segment are underlined by the statistic that its UK airport business in this area is now six times bigger than pre-pandemic.
“We built the business over time,” Harrison notes. “We’ve been working hard at this with our own team of health and beauty buyers for the last five years and beyond. We’ve really got into the categories and done a lot of work on really understanding what customers want [from an airport health and beauty offer].”
Harrison reveals that WHSmith commissioned research that heard from more than 20,000 airport customers in the last two years, helping to shape its travel essentials offer, including health and beauty.
“We’re forensic about developing health and beauty like we are in all categories,” he continues. “We constantly monitor what sells and what doesn’t, and we’re very quick to swap things out that don’t sell and bring things in that do.
“Everything that you would find in a Boots store, we have a branded alternative, including a makeup range because we recognise that’s key.
“We’ve been able to be very agile in terms of getting out there and working with brands that are trending on Tiktok, offering trendy accessories like heatless curlers, for example. We’ve been able to bring these kinds of products in.”
Harrison also notes the growing importance of dermatological products, and points to WHSmith’s successful work with brands such as CereVe and La Roche Posay. “These are the kind of brands that are very selective about which retailers they work with, and we’ve been able to convince them to do a trial in our four pharmacy-related stores.
“We sell their brands where we have the support of a pharmacist and dedicated advisors, and we’ve now agreed on the base – they’re delighted with the way we’ve treated it.
“The launches have been hugely successful for us and now we’re going to extend that, having agreed to sell CereVe products in 70 stores from September.
“That’s a great case study of how we’ve been able to build up our capability in the health and beauty market, demonstrate that we’re credible, demonstrate that our buyers know what they’re doing and that they do a really good job with the brands. That’s how we’ve grown it over time.”
Discussing the WHSmith airport pharmacy element of the business, Harrison says: “Pharmacy is an important added offer, which we’ve built up in places like Gatwick, Birmingham and, of course, Heathrow airports, as well as in train stations. We now have the opportunity to accelerate the growth of that business with a bigger footprint at Heathrow.
“Importantly, it adds the green cross to our fascias, and that is another way of letting customers know that we go deeper than just a surface level health and beauty offer. It’s a clear signal that they can get everything they need.”
Asked about the financial performance of the pharmacy business, Harrison notes that “it doesn’t make the difference between the profitability of the store one way or another”.
“But it’s a really, really important service that we give to customers,” he asserts. “We anticipate the needs when people are going on holiday, often when they are time poor – they run out of time to get the things that they want or need before they go away. We offer that peace of mind, ensuring people can get medications and so on.”
A premium to-go F&B offer
Harrison expresses his excitement that the Heathrow expansion will allow WHSmith to take its Smith’s Family Kitchen business, which primarily offers to-go food and drink, to a new level.
Launched around 14 months ago, Smith’s Family Kitchen is being used as a vehicle to offer passengers not just the classic airport meal deal essentials that WHSmith is known for, but also a more premium to-go offer.
Harrison comments, “We’ve put a lot of time into our food and drinks offer, how we get not just the right proposition and flavours, but also the right quality and range of pricing offers.
“We have introduced a premium meal range through Smith’s Family Kitchen. The basic meal deal is obviously an important entry price point but not everybody wants to shop to that budget.
“So we’ve brought in wraps, triple sandwiches, baguettes, protein pots, premium sweet treats, sides and snacks, different types of salads and so on, plus catering for dietary requirements, such as gluten-free. There are more premium fillings, like chicken shawarma – lots of different flavours that we’ve been able to bring in.
“The range is really starting to grow and every week is a record week for premium food sales. That’s because a large proportion of those sales are incremental from new customers that wouldn’t normally have shopped with us for a budget meal deal.”
Harrison also notes that the WHSmith buyers will be bringing more coffee and bakery products into its Heathrow stores, and the retailer is also looking to better cater for breakfast options, with more yoghurts and juices and so on.
Elevating digital efforts
Digital elements will be enhanced across the WHSmith store estate, with next-generation self-service tills and internal and external digital signage highlighting the breadth of the travel essentials offer and related promotions.
“Because people are often on a strict timeline, they need to buy the essentials when they believe they’ve got the time to do it, so the store needs to be convenient,” says Harrison. “Digital plays an important role in delivering convenience.
“When we open these stores next year, we’ll be featuring our new format, self-checkout tills, with a new partner facilitating that,” he adds. “This is focused on how many seconds per transaction can we save so that we can make the whole process of getting in and out quicker and more efficient for the customer.”
On the timeline for the new and upgraded stores, Harrison confirms that all will be open across the three terminals in 2026, with much of the work completed by Easter.
We close by discussing how the offers of Lagardère Travel Retail and WHSmith might differ in terms of choice within the new Heathrow Airport travel essentials set up. Harrison’s response is one of great confidence in the WHSmith proposition.
He concludes, “I emphasise again that we are growing our business at Heathrow under the terms of the new deal. We think that our one-stop-shop proposition is really, really strong. We’ve pioneered it, it’s very successful and we believe in it.
“That’s what has won us the major share of the Heathrow travel essentials business. We back ourselves to compete and we are confident we will continue to demonstrate just how good our proposition is.” ✈
