Travellers who buy duty-free spirits are a boring lot

IN THE past, when flying home from a distant country, it was always my practice to bring back a litre of the local spirit from the duty-free shop. The names of these have now long escaped me: a sugary liqueur from Brazil that had a tree growing inside the bottle, something undrinkable made out of tree sap from India, a Greek concoction in a plastic container that may have been distantly related to ouzo. These delights, with exactly one shot’s-worth missing from the bottle, would, over the course of several years, shuffle their way to the back of my drinks cupboard. Then one day, when I needed the space, I would reach to the depths of my shelf looking for a likely bottle to discard, and wonder what on earth had made me think buying it was a good idea.

Nowadays I just buy gin.

Travellers spend $9 billion a year on duty-free spirits according to IWSR, a wine-and-spirits data collector. Yet flyers across the world show a singular lack of ambition for trying anything new. Using IWSR data, Vinepair, a drinks website, has put together a map of who buys what, where. Of the 13 regions it examined, Scotch was the most popular purchase in all but four. In Asia, over half of duty-free spirit sales were for whisky; in South America it accounted for 41%. Only in Central Europe and Eastern Europe (both vodka), Mexico (tequila) and the Caribbean (rum) did another spirit prevail. Apparently, Johnnie Walker alone accounts for 24% of all duty-free whisky sales. Among all spirits, Absolut vodka is a distant second, followed by Jack Daniel’s and Chivas Regal.

Duty-free is hugely important for retailers—so much so that Pernod Ricard, a French drinksmaker, refers to airports as the “sixth continent”. Perhaps one reason we are so conformist in our choices is that big brands expend so much energy enticing us during the “golden hour” between clearing security and boarding a plane that there is little chance for the local stuff to make itself seen.

That is a shame. And foisting something local and undrinkable on travellers might also help with another problem: people who buy duty-free so that they can surreptitiously imbibe it on the plane, and who then cause a fuss. This is now apparently such a problem that one British carrier, Jet2, is considering making passengers store their booze in tamper-proof bags that can only be opened using a sharp implement (and so should be impenetrable on a plane). Alternatively, let them try to get drunk on my Indian tree-sap. I suspect a single shot will put them off.