Whiskies Continue To Dominate Travel Retail Sales

The just-released annual IWSR magazine’s Top 100 Travel Retail Brands list reveals that most of the leading brands increased sales last year as the market began to recover following 2015’s downturn. Overall global travel-retail spirits sales increased by 3.2% in 2016 over 2015 to reach 22.5m nine-litre cases.

Johnnie Walker still leads the ranking with an 11.4% share of global travel-retail spirits volumes. Sales of the biggest-selling variant, Johnnie Walker Red Label, continued to decline last year, but there was growth for the Black Label, Gold Reserve, Platinum and XR lines, as well as the relaunched Green Label malt. Johnnie Walker saw the largest volume gain of all the 27 scotch brands featured on the list. Scotch is the most-represented category on the list with 27 brands. Vodka is second with 17 brands featured.

Pernod Ricard’s Chivas Regal reclaimed second place in the top 100 from Brown-Forman’s Jack Daniel’s. Jack Daniel’s sales grew by 11.5% in Europe last year, but declined in all other regions, particularly the Americas, despite the success of the new Tennessee Fire line, which was launched in travel retail in 2015 The three other US whiskies on the list, Jim Beam, Wild Turkey and Maker’s Mark all posted double digit growth. Chivas Regal was one of Pernod Ricard’s best-performing top 100 brands, along with Martell, Jameson, Havana Club and Kahlúa.