FAB 2024
Delivering key insights: Airport Food & Beverage Market Intelligence Reports
The Moodie Davitt Report Travel Retail Research Director Jess Allerton and tRetail Labs Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder Sossina Shenkute delivered original insights from the ground-breaking series of Airport Food & Beverage Market Intelligence Reports, which reveal never before seen levels of industry data on travel dining.
The size of the global F&B market in 2023 is estimated by the researchers to be worth between US$39 billion and US$45 billion.
The reports cover seven regions, with the third of the reports on Europe released during the FAB Conference. Each report gives first-ever market-size estimation of the various dining categories and formats that make up the airport F&B business, including restaurants, bars, cafés, fast-food outlets and more.
The report goes into further detail on average spend by category and the airports leading individual markets.
It also explores the cuisines on offer within each category as well as the most-prevalent brands. This insight is all brought to life by overlaying the traveller view, identifying sentiment about their preferred options and actual experience in each dining category.
Allerton revealed the reports span 350 airports encompassing 17,000 airport F&B outlets. She said: “We have harnessed developments in technology and AI [artificial intelligence], which allows our research to be delivered at a scale never before seen in the airport F&B industry.
“We’re talking about over 137 billion data points collected and analysed across traveller intelligence, the competitive landscape and spend and revenue which is funnelled into this reporting.
“The data is rich and reliable, it’s extensive and very comprehensive, all with the ability to scale or slice in many different ways. What we can do is help you identify the variables that have the most impact on spend and revenue.”
Sossina Shenkute: The vital consumer view
Shenkute explained that overlaying the traveller perspective into the reports means they deliver unique, high-scale insights. These insights are gleaned through ‘social listening’, which looks at traveller opinions and reviews relating to airport F&B, including 230,000 in the Asia region alone.
She said: “There are three main benefits in using social listening for this project. Firstly, the reviews are unprompted; secondly it provides us with authentic, self-directed feedback on traveller perceptions and experiences; and finally, it gives us the volume and scale that traditional research does not provide, without being hugely cost prohibitive.”
Once the traveller reviews have been collected, Shenkute said the researchers used a proprietary ‘experience score’ model to break down each review and score it on a positive-negative scale.
She continued: “The experience score indicates the degree of the positive or negative experience of a specific outlet based on what is written in the review. Once we have established the scores, we then try to understand what is driving that experience. So, we score each review across our series of experience attributes, ranging from brand appeal to product quality and staff friendliness.
Jess Allerton: The research spans many thousands of data points
“With these scores, we now have a better picture of what could be influencing the positive or negative experience at the outlet, thus getting closer to gaining actionable insights.”
Completing the picture, Shenkute said another major dimension to the reports is market sizing. “We do this through our proprietary revenue estimation model, which is a function of the myriad data points we have gathered. This includes flight stats, airport data, experience scores, spend surveys, outlet attributes and over 40 more modifiers that capture the complexity and context of each outlet and airport, all powered through AI and machine-learning models.
“Ultimately, what we’re doing with all this data is developing a highly targeted and nuanced approach for gaining actionable intelligence for the airport F&B sector. Beyond just intelligence, we aim to help our clients identify tactical opportunities for optimising revenue.”
For more information on the methodology and obtaining the Airport Food & Beverage Market Intelligence Reports, email jessica@moodiedavittreport.com.
FAB eZine
August 2024
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