Catching MICE – and two birds with one stone: Lotte Duty Free widens shopper target base to help ‘normalise’ market

SOUTH KOREA. Lotte Duty Free (CEO Kim Dong-ha) has launched what it called a full-scale drive to ‘normalise’ a troubled travel retail market through attracting more foreign group tourists.

The travel retailer said it will welcome 5,000 group tourists through March, following earlier visits to the Republic by 1,000 employees of direct-selling business Amway Taiwan Company (3-5 March) and around 3,000 Mainland Chinese cruise passengers on 2 March.

About 1,200 Amway employees in three groups visited South Korea, visiting leading tourist destinations in Seoul, Incheon and Gangwon-do, with Lotte Duty Free the sole duty-free shopping experience.

The travel retailer welcomed the group with a placard and presented sets of six travel pouches as gifts. The Taiwanese visitors showed strong interest in K-food items and domestic beauty brands such as Nonfiction and Tamburins.

The Mainland cruiseline passengers visited Busan, touring Lotte Duty Free’s downtown store in the southern city.  In addition, about 800 Chinese cosmetics company incentive group tourists are scheduled to visit Lotte Duty Free’s main Myeong-dong, Seoul store at the end of March.

Catching MICE

In early January, Lotte Duty Free established a new marketing division through which it has strengthened its customer segmentation target marketing by deploying three teams covering group tourists, free independent travellers (FIT) and communications.

“The strategy is to do our best to attract MICE [meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) and incentive group tourists, including general group travellers, to catch two birds with one stone: sales and profitability,” Lotte Duty Free commented.

Additionally, Lotte Duty Free hosted an event in late February for major travel agency tour interpreters from China, Japan and Southeast Asia.

Lotte Duty Free is leveraging K-content to quickly identify local market trends through its offices in Japan and China to attract foreign tourists. The company is also participating in overseas travel fairs to promote the attractions of duty-free shopping.

Lotte Duty Free CEO Kim Dong-ha said: “We will do our best to attract foreign tourists and increase the satisfaction of travel through duty-free shopping by leveraging the competitiveness of our duty-free business that we have built up over the past 45 years.

“Lotte Duty Free will take the lead in normalising the duty-free market and creating a healthy distribution tourism market through various activities to attract foreign tourists.”