Inside the Travel Retail Mindset: What Today’s Beauty Shoppers Want and How Brands Must Respond
- Anna Grinsvall
- Dec 1, 2025
- 3 min read
At the TFWA World Exhibition & Conference in Cannes 2025, one theme dominated founder, brand and retail conversations: travel retail is transforming faster than many brands realise. With international passenger flows rising and airports becoming strategic retail destinations, the shopper passing through these spaces behaves differently from any domestic consumer.
Industry leaders at Cannes made one point clear: time, context and emotion shape the traveller’s mindset more than demographics ever could. Some customers want speed; others linger and explore. Some are motivated by clarity; others seek discovery. In 2025, beauty brands must abandon assumptions borrowed from domestic retail and build strategies designed specifically for the realities of travel.
A Customer in a Different Shopping Mode For Elsa Laloum of AHAVA, travel retail begins with understanding the mindset of someone on the move. When asked how to approach the end customer, she emphasises relevance above all.
“They address his needs. And we know it's a different shopping mode,”
She explains, noting that travellers navigate the environment differently from domestic shoppers and require more immediate, clearly framed solutions.
This difference in “mode” shapes everything: the pacing, the decision-making, the emotional state and the openness to discovery.
Competing Through Values and Smart Assortment
Camilla Paulsson, Global Travel Retail Lead at Lumene, sees firsthand how entering travel retail reshapes a brand’s competitive landscape.
“Because we are competing against different brands, we also have a different selling point,” she explains.
Lumene’s sustainability narrative proved especially resonant at Cannes: its B Corp status and high circularity metrics communicate trust within seconds, which is critical when many travellers are encountering the brand for the first time.
Assortment must also adapt to the environment. “Duo-sets and things like minis to fly… those are the ones which are super important to us,” Paulsson notes. The blend of practicality, value and immediacy positions the brand strongly in high-traffic, premium-leaning retail spaces.
The Demand for Novelty, Simplicity and Instant Appeal
For Tianyi Kiy of The PCA Companies, the travel-retail customer is driven by curiosity but only if the product communicates its story immediately.
“They are looking for something different… something new,”
She says, underscoring why the company’s bold, visually distinctive brands attract travellers so quickly.
Clarity matters just as much as novelty. “I want something obvious. I want something shouty, something that's simple,” she adds, explaining how travellers gravitate toward designs and scents they can decode at a glance.
In fast-moving airport environments, products that “speak for themselves” outperform those that require explanation.
Impulse, Colour and the Power of Minis
In nails and haircare, Luis Blanco Alvarez of Wella/OPI sees travel retail as a proving ground for fast, high-impact categories.
“Nails are a fantastic impulse buy,”
He explains, citing OPI’s strong colour awareness and seasonal drops.
Travel retail requires a tighter, faster-turning edit:
Exclusive collections
Seasonal colour updates four times a year.
Mini sets and three-step routines
Entry-point SKUs that invite sampling without commitment
Haircare follows similar patterns. Rather than core shampoo-and-conditioner systems, travellers gravitate toward treatments.“It would be more like a serum… the typical things that can get people into the category,” Alvarez explains.
These formats meet both sides of traveller behaviour: quick conversion for high-speed shoppers, and discovery for those who slow down.
Across every conversation in Cannes, one insight stood out: travel-retail shoppers behave differently because their context is different. They move faster. Or slower. They want clarity. Or discovery. They react to novelty, sustainability, speed, comfort, premium cues and practicality — sometimes all at once. The brands that succeed are those designing intentionally for this high-mobility environment, not repackaging domestic strategies for an airport shelf. Understanding the travel-retail mindset is no longer an advantage; in 2025, it is essential.
