ARI to extend Runway

John Rimmer

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Montreal Pierre Trudeau will be the next airport to welcome Aer Rianta International's new retail brand, as the company confirms it has withdrawn its interest in the Birmingham tender

Aer Rianta International (ARI) is to widen the roll-out of its new retail brand Runway, which it has adopted in its outlets at New York JFK and Moscow Domodedevo airports. The next airport operation to be rebranded will be Montreal Pierre Trudeau, where the retailer's Aer Rianta International-North America division will open a new 1,400sq m (15,064sq ft) shop in June.

"The airport will open a new departures wing in June that will consolidate traffic and offer us the first opportunity we've had in Canada to design a new store for international passengers," ARI director general Eamon Foley told RavenFox.com sister publication DFNI. "It will be an open-plan shop and will offer us improved efficiencies, especially as we won't have to deliver goods to the gate. It's a C$5.5m ($4.5m) investment and we're planning to use the Runway brand extensively."

The Runway brand was devised to lend greater cohesion to ARI's range of duty-paid stores at New York JFK, which it runs in a joint venture with Austrian retailer Sardana Group. Foley said the company was studying where else it would "make sense" to launch the concept. "In any new business that we take over, you can be sure that we will introduce the Runway concept. In existing businesses we'll look at the brands we have in place and decide whether Runway is appropriate. I think the concept could work in the Middle East but we'll have to balance it against the strong brands we already have there. Bahrain Duty Free, for example, is a well recognised brand, and we'll have to decide if there any benefit for them in us introducing a new one. The same is true of Moscow Duty Free."

Foley also confirmed that ARI had pulled out of the bidding for the duty-free contract at Birmingham airport in the UK. "We would only have [bid] if we'd felt we could capture market share [in the UK], and Birmingham alone wouldn't have been that interesting," he said.

See DFNI February 1, out next week, for a full interview with Eamon Foley.