It seems Dixon Travel will be vanishing soon enough from airport terminals as the group owners continues to adjust how it operates.
Terminal 3 departures waiting area.
The owners – Dixons Carphone released the news in their trading update. They say:
- We do not expect passenger numbers to recover sufficiently to compensate for the removal of airside tax-free shopping by the UK Government from 1 January. This has led to the difficult decision to close this business, which historically made an annual profit contribution of over £20m.
How many stores?
The company has stores at the following airports – 24 in UK and Ireland, with another 11. UK and Ireland stores include:
- Aberdeen
- Belfast International
- Birmingham
- Bristol
- Dublin (Terminal 1 and 2)
- East Midlands
- Edinburgh
- Glasgow
- Liverpool
- London City
- London Gatwick (North and South Terminals)
- London Heathrow (Terminal 2, 3, 4 and 5)
- London Luton
- London Stansted
- Manchester (Terminals 1, 2 and 3)
- Newcastle
- Southend
Out of all of these, only Dublin Terminal 1 is currently trading.
The move is expected to impact 400 jobs. Most of these stores have been closed since the start of the first lockdown in March 2020.
The moves follow the end of tax-free shopping for visitors to the United Kingdom.
For other airport shops which have thrived on tax-free shopping, it is the first of the big retailers to pull their services from an airport.
Will anyone step in their place? A good question, considering there will be no savings shopping air-side verses on the high street.
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More to come. The media talks about ‘reopening’.
But what does that mean? Who wants to go anywhere in a mask in the middle of summer, with stores closed or hours limited, with non-stop social distancing, with limited hours and capacities, with curfews and lockdowns and jurisdictional border guards requiring who knows what to pass? Glad I did my tour of crowded Venice in 2019, including the Doge’s palace with Viator. These sorts of experiences are things of the past now.
How many more businesses have to shut? Get your vax and then leave people alone.
Shame about the jobs. TBH, there really were precious few savings on UK Amazon or high-street prices – if any. It seems to me the attraction was to travellers from even higher-tax regimes, and difficult to understand why the Chancellor killed this golden goose. I suspect most of the “tax-free” savings were sucked up by the huge CAA “find the airport hidden in this mall” fees?
I do fear that as the CAA is going to lose money here, they will find other ways to make it up. They have already had a request to increase passenger surcharges refused (so far).
Could it be that UK airports will return to being comfortable places for the travelling public to relax before their next flights? Nah….