Tourvest Duty Free (TDF) has won the inflight retail contract for flagship carrier British Airways. Three operators submitted bids for the contract—Alpha Flight, Duty Free Air and Ship Supply (DFASS) and TDF—after an invitation to tender was issued by the airline in the first half of last year.

A memo to suppliers from BA Inflight Retail stated: “It is BA’s intention to outsource inflight retail to Tourvest in [the second half] of this year. As a result, product listings commencing or ongoing at July 1 will be jointly reviewed by BA and Tourvest. Therefore, listings that commence May 1 can only be guaranteed for May and June.”

An official statement from BA said: “We are looking to reduce the complexity and cost of our inflight retail operation and believe outsourcing it to another company will deliver benefits both to our customers and to ourselves. We expect to complete the switch in the second half of 2011. In the meantime there will be no change to what our customers experience on board.”

The tender was issued in the first half of last year as BA announced record annual losses of £531m ($850m), the worst since the group was privatised in 1987. Since then it has made a remarkable recovery, recording a profit of £158m ($253m) in the six months to September 2010 and reversing a loss of £292m ($467) for the same period the year before. The growth was driven by higher pricing driven by long-haul premium traffic rather than growth in passenger numbers, according to analysts.

Source: http://www.dfnionline.com/article/British-Airways-to-outsource-inflight-retail-programme-1860779.html