Lotte Duty Free woos tourists from Southeast Asia through travel and tourism fairs
Indonesian employees of financial services provider Allianz visiting Lotte Duty Free’s Myeongdong store. Lotte is actively wooing tourists from Southeast Asia to diversify its customer nationalities
Lotte said the Indonesian tourists had a lot of interest in K-fashion brands and cosmetics
Lotte Duty Free has been actively attracting new customers by participating in travel and tourism fairs held in Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan and Russia. As a result of its efforts, the company has seen an increase of over 45% from the sales results of its Myeongdong store in the fourth quarter of 2018.
Tourists numbers from chartered and cruise groups have yet to recover since THAAD in March 2017. As a result, Lotte created an overseas office in Taiwan last year and a new organization that will be responsible for diversifying its customer nationalities to include those in Southeast Asia, Russia and China.
Explaining Lotte’s strategy, Jung Sam-soo, the head of Lotte Duty Free’s marketing division said: "Lotte Duty Free is constantly working on ways to increase the percentage of sales of multinational tourists in Southeast Asia and other countries."
"We will try to attract inbound customers who are out of China's central area by establishing a long-term business plan."
As part of this diversification strategy, Lotte has visited local agents to develop travel packages. It also shared a booth with Vietnam’s Cam Ranh International Airport at the 2019 Root Asia Summit. As reported previously, Lotte aimed to bring new international routes to the airport to increase its duty-free sales. The Summit is the world’s largest aviation conference and attracts over 800 air service professionals representing more than 300 airports, airlines and tourism authorities.
More recently, on 25 March, Lotte attracted around 900 Indonesian employees of Allianz, a global financial services provider, on a company incentive tour to Lotte’s Myeongdong store. Another group of 1,100 Allianz employees will arrive in Seoul on 25 April, where they will tour Seoul and other areas for six days and five nights. Lotte noted that it is uncommon for tourists to visit them in such a large group, as such, it believes that this is a sign that it is increasing its Southeast Asian customers.
