Luxury brands setting sights on travelers

Luxury brands are stepping up the battle for traveling shoppers with more outlets at airports and on cruise ships, tapping into one of the fastest-growing sections of the market that looks set to keep booming, thanks to soaring numbers of Asian tourists.

Revenues from travel retail, which also includes sales on airplanes, rose 9.4 percent in 2012 to $55.8 billion, according to a market study by Generation Research.

It should reach $60 billion this year and nearly double in size by 2020, the study forecast.

"This channel is becoming very important," Bruno Pavlovsky, chairman of Chanel's fashion business, says. "Customers are spending time in airports where the environment has become increasingly sophisticated."

The French luxury brand, the world's second-biggest behind Louis Vuitton by sales, has boutiques in four Asian airports and one at London's Heathrow, and next year will open a boutique in Paris Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport and another in Dubai.

Kering's Gucci, which like mega-brand rival Louis Vuitton, has suffered a slowdown in the past two years partly due to emerging market shoppers' growing preference for logo-free products, has opened boutiques in the same locations recently.

Tourism spending is up 12 percent worldwide since January while spending by Chinese tourists in Europe is up closer to 20 percent, according to data from tax-refund company Global Blue.

Chinese tourists, who barely featured in luxury brands' customer statistics a little more than a decade ago, now make up 29 percent of global luxury spending, consultancy Bain & Co says in a report published this week. That trend is set to continue, with Boston Consulting Group forecasting nearly half of all air traffic in the medium term will come from the Asia-Pacific versus 37 percent now.

Though most luxury brands raised prices, particularly in the euro zone and in Japan, to make up for currency moves, Bain estimates that more than two-thirds of luxury spending by Chinese mainland customers was made overseas in 2013, due partly to local duties.

According to Renaissance Capital, Europe remains the cheapest market for handbags with prices 9 percent below those in Hong Kong and 28 percent below the Chinese mainland, while the yen's weakness has played in favor of luxury shoppers in Japan.

BCG expects the Chinese travel market will grow at a compound annual rate of about 11 percent from 2012 to 2030.

Chinese urban travelers took about 500 million domestic and outbound trips in 2012, spending about $260 billion, and it expects those numbers to increase to 1.7 billion trips and $1.8 trillion in spending by 2030.

Hermes, which has 50 boutiques in airports around the world, is turning these into proper free-standing shops to better tap the booming market.

"This channel affects customers that are more interested in luxury than the average," says Patrick Albaladejo, deputy managing director of Hermes, adding that travel retail represented a "significant" portion of the brand's total sales.

L'Oreal, the world's biggest cosmetics group and maker of Lancome creams and Yves Saint Laurent lipstick, created a division last month dedicated to travel retail, which it described as a "sixth continent".

Sales from travel retail generate 15 percent of total revenues at L'Oreal's luxury division and 12 percent for rival Guerlain, the perfume and cosmetics brand owned by LVMH.

Perfume and cosmetics represent the biggest product category for travel retail with 28 percent of the market, according to Generation Research, ahead of wines and spirits with an 18 percent market share, fashion and accessories with 13.5 percent and watches and jewelry with 12.2 percent.