Purchasing & Logistics

COMPTENT PURCHASING and proficient logistics are crucial components for any retailing success and absolutely imperative in the highly competitive travel retail trade. Consequently, these services are integrated as core modules in all our retailing solutions.

We use our significant, collective buying power to secure the best deals for our customers. Coupled with our vast product and market expertise, we are able to design innovative product assortments that give your retail operation a competitive edge and add to consumer satisfaction.

A highly efficient logistics organization ensures reliable and flexible distribution throughout the entire supply chain.

Strategic Purchasing

STRATEGIC PURCHASING lies at the heart of our service concept. Our significant combined annual purchases gives us the weight as a buyer to negotiate the best possible terms for our customers. Using our vast product and market expertise, we assemble attractive product assortments that gives your retailing operation a competitive edge and contribute to consumer satisfaction. Additionally, by entrusting us with the purchasing responsibility, our customers are relieved of the need of costly purchasing organizations, permitting them to focus resources on core business demands.

The collective purchasing model presents benefits for our suppliers as well. It provides them with a single, one-stop partner, eliminating the need for time-exhausting individual sales to every customer and making the order and administrative processes more efficient. Our established logistics structure also offer international suppliers an efficient sales channel for entering and/or penetrating the Nordic and Baltic travel retail markets. 

Beside the price and administrative benefits provided by volume procurement, Inflight Service’s purchasing model also offers our customers other advantages. As partners in the our Purchasing Pool, our customers are given access to a powerful market tool, providing in-depth information on market and consumer trends, assortment expertise and advanced market intelligence systems.

Logistics & Distribution

LOGISTICS & DISTRIBUTION is the second core component in our service concept, designed to ensure reliable flows with short lead times, efficient handling, and to simplify the process for both customers and suppliers.

Our customers are served from modern warehouse facilities with 10,000 square meters of floor space, strategically located in southern Sweden. From here we are able to handle in the excess of 3 million cases a year.

Green Cargo - leading logistics experts - is entrusted with our warehouse management and distribution. Utilizing its wealth of experience and state-of-art logistics systems, Green Cargo ensures meticulous control and reliable handling through every step of the supply chain.

Cost-efficiency is guaranteed through an activity-based cost model where customers are charged only for actual use and factual cost. Continuous follow-up on KPI’s, decided in collaboration with customers, assures that high-set quality goals are met.  

Airline Retailing

INFLIGHT SERVICE PROVIDES comprehensive solutions that enable airlines to offer its passengers a wide range of onboard retailing, entertainment and other cabin services, but without the burden of top-heavy administration. Our service concepts increase passenger spending and at the same time add to customer satisfaction. 

Fully employed, our service concept provides nothing less than a complete retailing organization that integrates seamlessly into your business, adds efficiency and contributes greatly in increasing your revenue. 

Under the pressure of plummeting ticket prices, airlines are looking for alternative revenue sources. Lower fares also necessitate cutbacks in the level of complimentary onboard service. In general, passengers accept this trade-off provided that airlines offer a level of payable services that meet customer expectations. 

Our retail solutions encompass service modules catering to every stage of the retailing process:

Procurement
We use our considerable collective purchasing power to negotiate the best possible deals for our customers, ensuring that you receive highly competitive prices for a diverse and attractive product assortment. 

Assortment Management
We provide the expertise and tools necessary to ensure that your retailing operation always encompasses a diverse, up-to-date product offer, representative of you brand values and adapt to consumer preferences. 

Product Development
Our long experience in the field enables us to develop new product and service concepts that open up unexploited revenue streams and adds to customer satisfaction.


Packing & Distribution
Our airline partners are served from our modern packing and distributions center in Tibro (Southern Sweden), where bars, onboard assortments and passenger pre-orders are packed and dispatched to local catering facilities with strategic locations nearby the airports of delivery. 

Passenger pre-orders are delivered in sealed bags straight to the aircrafts, where they are placed in the customer's assigned seat.







Marketing & Communication
We provide a full range of marketing and promotion services that support the sales process at every stage. Wherever possible, the marketing effort is initiated even prior to the ticket sale through advertisement in the travel operator's brochures and web site and product displays in ticket offices. 

Following the ticket purchase, travelers are offered convenient pre-order from the mail catalogue or the airline's e-store. The process is followed up selectively via e-mail and telemarketing. 

Onboard, your retail message is conveyed through printed material, gate and cabin attendant announcements and in-flight promotional films.



Staff Training 
Knowing that sales and service are closely interlinked, we provide extensive training programs for your cabin staff. The detailed curriculum is worked out together with you to integrate with your routines and corporate values, but always emphasizes sales & marketing techniques, administrative routines and product and customer knowledge.

Incentive Plans
We employ tested individual and group incentive plans that motivate your staff to exhaust the full sales potential and engage in continuous improvements. The detailed design is decided together with our partner to adapt to specific conditions and requirements.




POS & Back Office Systems
Inflight Service employ the latest technological systems to assure optimized efficiency and reliability throughout the entire supply chain. Cabin crews are equipped with state-of-the-art POS terminals for easy, expedient and secure transactions.

The terminals communicate seamlessly to our back office accounting system, which in turn is on-line with our logistics system, ensuring efficiency in the ordering, stock and distribution processes.







Reports & Analysis
Our partners receive comprehensive, periodical reports and analysis, providing detailed information about performance and trends. 

Tax & VAT Management
With a comprehensive tax and VAT management system in place already in 1999, IFS offers vast experience in efficient and speedy excise administration. A European network of tax representatives assists us in ensuring expedient and accurate management. 

Airport & Ferry Retail

WITH OUR LONG EXPERIENCE both as an airport retailer and as a trusted supplier to leading ferry & cruise lines, Inflight Service is well equipped to offer turnkey retail solutions that adapt equally well to airports as onboard passenger ships. 

Because, from a retailing perspective, the two shopping environments present many similarities: Firstly, airports and ships both form concentrated shopping environments that gather large numbers of consumers, highly motivated and with time on their hands. Furthermore, for travelers in both environments, shopping offers the combined opportunity for bargain shopping and a meaningful way to spend their pastime - providing a break away from stress and/or monotony.

These and many other similarities allow for a favorable adaptation of successful retail concepts from one environment to the other.

By implementing tailored versions of our successful EUROSHOP shops concept, we are able to offer travelers at airports and onboard ships with world-class shopping, perfectly adapt with the local environment. 

Entrusting us with full management responsibilities provides our partners with a superior travel retail offer, thoroughly designed to increase revenue and relieving them from the need of costly in-house retailing organization. It allows them to focus on their core business, resting assured that we will utilize all our retailing expertise and other resources to make the most of their shopping operation.

Our partners not only benefit from our vast retailing expertise, but also from our collective purchasing model, lending them our weight as a buyer to secure the best deals; our vast market and assortment expertise, providing them with perfectly adapt product offers; and our logistics & distribution system, ensuring efficient and reliable supply flows.

Market Intelligence

FOR THE BENEFIT OF ITS PARTNERS, Inflight Service assembles its customers in the Strategic Purchasing Pool, designed to facilitate the procurement process and promote the exchange of market information.

Our broad and diverse customer base enables us to collect vast amounts of data about market trends and passenger preferences, which is processed and made available to our partners through our computerized market intelligence system, ISAQ.

Based on monthly sales data collected from all customers, this unique tool provides an invaluable source of information for assortment and price optimization as well as a basis for the development of new services to meet changing customer demands.

A web-based interface makes the information available from anywhere at any time. Authorized users can view their own detailed data as well as comparative statistics about their sales channel (airlines, ferry & cruise lines and airports) as a whole. Information is available for several aggregation levels and according to varied analytic units, making it an indispensable aid in the decision process. Comparison of historic data enables in-depth evaluation of changing consumer preferences and seasonal variations.

Marketing Services

INNOVATIVE AND APT MARKETING is an indispensable component  for any retail success, and it's therefore an integrated core service in our retail concepts for airlines, airports and ferry & cruise lines. Our marketing team provides inventive marketing schemes, tailored to fit the specific sales channel as well as the special requirements of each individual customer. With our extensive experience and market knowledge, we are able to offer a complete range of professional advertisement and promotion services, covering print and electronic media, events and personal - from concept and design to production and implementation. 

Print media
We create and produce printed media that correspond to all different phases of the sales process, from pre-order to on-site promotion. Our product and marketing teams work closely together to ensure that design and content correspond to reflect the customer’s corporate image and convey a strong commercial message. Some examples of our most common publications are:

• Sales brochures and catalogues that let the traveler browse and pre-order from the full product offer
• On-site media, such as onboard brochures, flyers and promotion leaflets

•  In-shop and onboard advertisement 
  
  

Digital and Web Solutions
Our marketing concepts make full use of digital technology and the web. Most suited for airline retailing, but also applicable for other sales environments, we design, develop and administer sophisticated web shop solutions. Digital technology is also used for targeted e-marketing, promotional videos and much more.

Events and On-site Promotion
Through our close cooperation with suppliers and customers, we are able to create supporting on-site events and promotion activities such as product launches and demos, prize competitions, cross-over activities with other on-site service providers.

On-site and Shop Advertisement & Displays
We are able to offer our suppliers a wide variety of on-site advertisement and display opportunities, offering possibilities for effective exposure and brand building that drive sales. The display possibilities are of course determined by the specific retail environment, but encompass wall and shelve light boxes, customized displays and much more. 

IT Services

INFLIGHT SERVICE WAS EARLY in recognizing the vital importance of making full use of advanced IT technology for achieving enhanced control and efficiency at all levels of operations. This foresight has provided us with extensive competence, allowing us to stay in the forefront of the technological progress and to supply our customers with powerful tools that support and enhance all parts of the retailing process.

Based on our acquired know-how, we have built and implemented powerful IT solutions throughout our organization, which enable us to integrate all tasks from purchasing/ordering & merchandising, via logistics & distribution, to sales, auditing & administration into a resourceful and perfectly apt system. 

All our applied subsystems are based on cutting edge, industry standard applications to enable effortless integration with the computer environments of our customers. The applications undergo continuous development and customization to fully comply with both our own and our customers demands - and to complement and interact seamlessly with each other. 

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