Mission Statement

INFLIGHT SERVICE EUROPE AB is a specialist service provider, catering to travel retail operators, primarily airlines, ferry & cruise ship lines and airport retailers, but also to adjacent business fields. 

Our services aim at increasing our customers’ operational efficiency and earnings by lending our retailing, product and marketing expertise, logistic organization and collective purchasing power. By relieving our customers from their auxiliary retailing engagement, our services permit the customer to direct full focus on its core business.

Our business activities are currently concentrated mainly to the Northern and Eastern European regions, but the adaptable nature of our service concepts gives our business a borderless scope.

We aim at maintaining and strengthening our achieved leading market position within Nordic/Baltic travel retail and to expand into new geographic areas and market niches.

Ethics

ONVINCED THAT SUSTAINED business success can only be attained by earning the respect of our customers, suppliers and colleagues, Inflight Service is committed to the exercise of an honest and decent conduct in every aspect of our business activities. 

We are committed not only to abide by national and international laws and conventions, but to live up to and where possible transcend universal ethic principles as well as global and local expectations of honorable business practices and respectful human conduct. More specifically, this means:

To our customers: To be a reliable, resourceful and service-minded partner, sensitive to our partners demands; to provide valuable expertise and adapt service solutions in accordance with our commitments; to put our partner's interest first where and when a choice is required; and to maintain an open dialogue that is the foundation for building sustained partnerships characterised by mutual trust and confidence.

To our suppliers: To award our partners on the supplier side the same respect that we ourselves expect to be receive in our supplier capacity; to honor entered agreements; and to foster solid business relationships, built on openness, fairness and mutual trust.

To our employees: To be a good, attentive and supportive employer, treating each individual with equal respect and courtesy; to provide a secure and stimulating workplace in which the individual can grow and prosper; to recognize and promote individual and group talent and effort; to cultivate an open environment that encourages initiative and rewards creativeness and innovation; to oppose prejudice in every form and to invite diversity, which we believe is the key dynamic for positive development and success.

Environment

INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL IS an indispensable part of modern life and a prerequisite for continued global economic growth and peaceful interaction between people. It is also one of the most appreciated leisure activities for billions of people around the world, providing unparalleled stimuli for body and mind.

Shopping is an established and integral part of the travel experience, perceived by most travellers as a welcomed and rewarding activity at airports, onboard planes and ships.

With that said, we acknowledge that both the travel and the retailing trades have environmental implications that must be addressed to ensure a sustained positive development for the industries. Sharing the international community's environmental concerns, Inflight Service takes its responsibility seriously and tries to be in the forefront in finding sustainable and measured solutions.

The Market

The Nordic/Baltic Travel Market

An outlying location at the northern rim of Europe, vast distances and long coastal borders are just a few of the factors that have historically shaped Scandinavians into traveling peoples. Mercantile by tradition, the small but industrious Nordic nations rely heavily on foreign trade for the preservation of their welfare. Consequently, business travel is among the highest in the world in relative terms. In current days, the achieved affluence also allows large parts of the populations to escape the long, dark winter months and unpredictable summers for leisure get-aways to more pleasant corners of the world. All factors combined create a travel market far exceeding what the sheer size of the region’s population might suggest. 

The North and Baltic Seas are among the busiest waters in the world. Each year, passenger ferries carry more than 27 million people to and from Sweden alone. Until recently – before completion of the big bridge projects, linking Scandinavia with the continent – ferries were the sole means of reaching continental Europe. Still today, ferries continue to play a vital role for the passenger and vehicle flow between the countries of the region – an importance that has increased with the opening of the new Baltic and Eastern European democracies. But the ferry lines are also popular for the leisure travel, offering short “mini cruises”: Every year some 650,000 Swedes travel by ship to Finland. The Nordic/Baltic region is also a potent air travel market, which again Swedish statistics illustrates: 

• Regular and charter airlines carried 23,5 million passengers to and from Swedish airports in 2004.

• The approx. 9 million Swedes make close to 10 million foreign trips annually (not including the over 5 million short-distance “frontier crossings” to neighboring countries). Some 72 percent of all foreign travel is leisure oriented.
  

The Nordic/Baltic Travel Retail Market

Since passenger and travel retail volumes go hand in hand, the Nordic/Baltic region is a market of considerable size. In fact, four Nordic countries individually rank among the 25 largest markets in the world. Measured as a group, the Nordic region – with a combined population of less than 25 million – places itself as the world’s second largest duty free and travel retail market with total sales amounting to 2,031 million USD (2004)!

The impressive ranking is primarily a result of the region’s very high travel frequency, but other factors contribute as well. Although the high domestic price levels on most consumer goods are slowly approaching the European average, the gap is still wide enough for travel retail to be a consumer-perceived real value. Also, exceptionally high domestic taxation on alcoholic beverages in Sweden and particularly Norway provides further incentives. No surprise therefore, that wines & spirits is the best selling product category in the Nordic market, contributing with 34 percent of overall sales. It is followed by perfumes & cosmetics (24 percent) and confectionary (21 percent). Accessories (11 percent) and tobacco goods (10 percent) come in almost even at place 4 and 5.

Unlike global trends, where airport shops is the largest sales channel, ferry & cruise ship sales rank first in the Nordic area.

Management Team

Inflight Service's Management Team reflect the core values that have brought the company to where it is today: expertise, experience, dedicated service and a hand-on entrepreneurial spirit. Its members comprises:

Per Thelin (Mr.)
CEO

Roland Bergh (Mr.)
IT & HR

Åsa Källenius (Ms.)
Finance

Johan Bjarke (Mr.)
Airline Retail

Peter Candell (Mr.)
Airport & Ferry Retail

John Baumgartner (Mr.)
Operations

Jan-Erik Eriksson (Mr.)
Category Management

To email any of the above members, please address the message with firstname.lastname followed by @inflightservice.se.

Owner

Triton is a leading private equity firm focusing on investments in the Nordic and German-speaking regions. Triton has more than 4 billion Euro in committed capital from Nordic and international investors. Triton has offices in Stockholm, Frankfurt and London and its investment focus includes businesses in the retail and consumer products sectors.

INFLIGHT SERVICE'S STORY begins back in 1991, when three executives at SAS – Scandinavian Airlines System decide to go independent. And, as the saying goes, the rest is history. Here are some milestones along the road to where we are today.

Inflight Service Europe AB | Tullvägen 2B | SE-190 46 Stockholm | Sweden | Tel: +46 (0)8 594 90700 | info@inflightservice.se