Following a visit to meet Groupe ADP in Paris on 4 March, we continue our series on the evolution of the Extime Paris concept, two years on since its creation. The Extime project was developed as an eco-system to add value to retail, dining and services, initially at ADP airports but with ambitions to expand to other locations. In this article we focus on the role of the newly-created Extime Campus in driving service standards. Click here for our initial story.
FRANCE. “We have created welcoming venues for our passengers but it’s also very important to create a place for our staff.”
So says Groupe ADP Chief Customer Officer Mathieu Daubert about the development of the Extime Campus, a site on airport land at Paris Charles de Gaulle, to draw together the ‘community of Extimers’ in one place for training and to foster a culture of hospitality across the business.
Already 4,000 employees of the Extime partnerships have come through training at the hub since it opened in late 2024, but it is much more than a training location, as Extime Paris Duty Free Executive Vice President Guy Bodescot explains.
“This is a place for recruitment and training but it is also the first time we have created a space where Extimers can meet and exchange ideas,” he says.
“This is a space to elevate our community in terms of expertise. We have two distinct areas here. One is an educational space to absorb information on the brands and products we sell, taught in the way you would at a school or university.
“Here the way every room is laid out, and the furniture we picked up for each room gives a different ambience. We are highly flexible and the trainer can move things around. Brands can come in and create their own environments with jewellery or spirits or other products.
“The other is an open location, very similar to the reception of a hotel, where you can sit, exchange ideas, in a flexible environment with mixed seating, which can a place for debate or where we can have experts from the world of hospitality to discuss their roles and the challenges they face.”
This twin-track approach is important, he adds, describing hospitality as “a permanent exchange of views, direct interaction with the customer translated into interaction between the people of our community”.
“We are demanding of our teams, and here is the place where we all have a say in constructing the relationship with our customer together. There will be no hospitality impact on our customers if it is not expressed by the front line. If the men and women in those jobs are not smiling and feeling ambitious in what they can do with the customer, or are not feeling emotionally and positively driven, then there will be no memorable impact on our customer.
“And if I want the sales people to smile and take care of the customer, they need to feel that the company is taking care of them as well.”
Within the hub, each Extime company manages its own training plan, whether it is serving staff from McDonald’s, Relay or a Hermès luxury store.
“We decide what is the experience we want to give to the customers, and whether you work in restaurants, lounges, reception desk or sales it doesn’t matter,” says Bodescot. “You will only create one memorable impact on your customer and working as a community in the same place underline the fact that when they go back to their terminals, they work as one team.”
It also transforms the commitment of the company to its teams. Bodescot says: “Within Extime there is duty free, travel essentials, food & beverage, lounges and media. Of those, only duty free and essentials had an annual training plan with at least 5,000 to 10,000 hours of training per year.
“The creation of one building like this is underlines the importance of all workers in the airside areas, and this did not exist before. And many of our sales assistants are saying, at last, ‘you invest in our training as much as you invest in the eye of our customer when they see our shops’.”
The activities at the Extime Campus should also help with retention, a perennial issue in the world of airport retail.
Bodescot says: “Staff turnover is around 23-25%, but we want it to be at 18-20%. We’ll always have this kind of level, first because we recruit many young people. Second, many people want to work at the airport for practical reasons but they aim to do something else long term.
“Third, we are still a base for receiving the authorisation badges to work at the airport. So we see staff moving from our teams to directly-operated luxury brands for example, which is a stress for managers but it also means they remain in the community with an identification with the brand – that is also legitimate and not such a bad thing.”
Ensuring good levels of retention also means training and engaging with teams in ways that are appropriate today, as opposed to the top-down, classroom-led approach of the past.
Bodescot says: “I don’t see my staff being simply representatives of the company. I see them as human beings interacting with other human beings, and out of it, we and they make money. They can be entrepreneurs in their own space. We are demanding of them but we also need to give them more autonomy.”
This is also taking shape as the company changes. Bodescot reflects on the relatively low proportion of women in senior roles when he joined in 2009 or when the original JV with Lagardère Travel Retail (named Société de Distribution Aéroportuaire) was created in 2011.
“I remember at the time I counted how many women we had on the Executive Committee and the three reporting lines underneath that.
“Those four lines combined were composed of 78% men. Now it has completely changed. It is 50:50 at the Executive Committee level, around 57-58% just underneath, and then 65% and 80% women in the next two lines. It is also a much younger company. For people today, if they don’t see that the company is fundamentally structured as they are structured or as they see the world, you cannot convince them.”
Daubert concludes: “In our new organisation all the companies come under the Extime umbrella. It’s not just a renaming, it’s a real reorganisation. We have to show all of the people who work here that they are part of a community of ‘Extimers’ and are part of the same project, not one differentiated by retail, F&B or other services.
“That’s what makes the Extime Campus an important development. It is the first phase of building the community. We are assessing how tools such as the Campus help drive professionalism, interaction between teams and give more emotion and pleasure to customers, which at the end of the day drives sales. It’s a major step – we have invested a lot in this Campus and we need a return in the form of quality of service.” ✈
*Watch out for further stories and interviews about Extime Paris, coming shortly on our platforms.
