By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
Can you imagine an airport without duty free shops? It would leave passengers bored to death until departure time.
Duty free shops are taken for granted these days. But they didn’t exist in the early years of air travel. The credit for opening the world’s first duty free shop goes to Shannon Airport in Ireland.
Shannon, about 380 kilometers west of the Irish capital, Dublin, is a small airport ― bearing only one runway ― and is the hub of low-cost carrier Ryanair. The airport, though, has a significant history.
In the 1940s, transatlantic aircrafts between mainland Europe and North America were unable to fly nonstop at the time. They had to refuel and Shannon, the westernmost airport in Europe, was the best place to carry out the procedure.
Flights of Trans World Airlines (TWA), Pan Am, American Overseas Airlines (AOA) and British Overseas Airways, a predecessor of British Airways, made stopovers there, leading to the term ``The Shannon Stopover.’’ About 500,000 passengers visited the airport a year in late 1940s.
In 1947, Brendan O’Regan, a 30-year-old worker at the airport, operating company AerRianta, came up with an idea, when he saw passengers waiting for the refueling of planes, bored and wandering about in the terminal. After passing through immigration, passengers have officially left the country, but have not yet entered another. And if they purchase items in such a situation, they are not entitled to pay taxes levied on items, since they are in legal limbo.
O’Regan promoted his idea under strong support from the regional government, and the Irish government passed a law exempting tax on items that passengers buy at the airport when departing, stopping over or on board a plane. Thus, the first duty free shop was born at Shannon Airport in 1947.
The shop, with only one female clerk, sold souvenirs and local products and began to sell liquor and cigarettes in 1951.
With passengers then able to buy duty free items at the terminal, they became engrossed in shopping and impulse purchasing. Witnessing unexpectedly high sales, AerRianta opened duty free shops on planes and on ships operating on international routes. About a decade later, many airports, such as Amsterdam, Brussels, London and Frankfurt, followed suit.