You’re the Regional Director for a premium whiskey brand with boutiques in 40+ airports worldwide. Your CEO wants to know:

“What should our Dubai store achieve this quarter without any marketing push?”

“Are our Hong Kong numbers genuinely impressive, or just riding seasonal trends?”

“How do we set realistic targets that challenge our teams without being impossible?”

In luxury travel retail, these aren’t just planning questions—they determine how you allocate millions in marketing spend, set team incentives, and measure true performance against market conditions.

The Challenge

Traditional approaches to target-setting rely on simple year-over-year growth assumptions that ignore the complex drivers of airport retail performance. The result? Teams either cruise past artificially low targets or struggle against unrealistic expectations that don’t account for passenger flow realities.

Why generic forecasting fails for Luxury Spirits

Airport retail for premium alcoholic beverages operates in a unique ecosystem that standard retail forecasting completely misses:

Passenger demographics drive everything

• Business class travelers from wealth markets vs. budget leisure passengers

• Cultural attitudes toward luxury spirits varying by origin country

• Gifting seasons that differ across Asian, European, and Middle Eastern travelers

Duty-Free value perception

• Currency fluctuations affecting savings perception for international travelers

• Home market availability and pricing of your specific brands

• Competitive landscape varying dramatically by airport and region

Solution

We developed a specialized forecasting framework for a leading luxury spirits company that needed accurate, marketing-agnostic baselines across their global airport portfolio. The system serves their corporate team with the insights needed for strategic planning and performance evaluation.

Core framework components

Airport-Specific demand modeling, each location receives customized forecasting that accounts for:

• Historical passenger volume patterns and seasonal variations
• Route-specific passenger demographics and spending propensity

• Economic indicators from key origin markets

Brand portfolio optimization

The model provides category-level insights:

• Premium Whiskey: Driven by business travel patterns and gifting seasonality

• Champagne: Sensitive to end of year holiday travel and gifting trends

• Luxury Cognac: Sensitive to Asian market economic conditions and cultural celebrations

• Craft Spirits: Correlated with leisure travel trends and experiential purchasing

Baseline vs. Achievable Targets

Two-tier forecasting approach:

• Natural Baseline: What the location should achieve with zero marketing intervention
• Stretch Targets: Realistic goals accounting for planned promotional activities