From APEX FTE EMEA and Ancillary & Retailing 2026, Dublin, 9 to 11 June. The first two movements looked at where airline revenue and intelligence are moving. This one is written for the people who run airports.
Walk the floor of an aviation conference and the airlines get the keynotes. The airports get the quieter conversations, off to the side, at the stands. That is a mistake of attention, because some of the most practical money in the building was being offered right there, to airports, in plain terms.
Around 40 to 50 percent of airport revenue worldwide is already non-aeronautical, the shops, the parking, the food, the advertising, everything that is not a landing fee. For most airports that is the half of the business with the better margins. The reflex, though, is that growing it means building it. More terminal, more retail floor, more footfall to fill the floor.
Dublin's floor argued otherwise. A handful of companies now let an airport sell third-party services, retail, food, visas, lounges, fast-track, and keep a share, without building, stocking, or staffing any of it. This is a field note on two of them, what they showed, how airports elsewhere have already earned from the same idea, and the part that matters most to a commercial team, which is exactly how the money comes back to the airport.
Interlinked, the shop without shelves
Picture a regional airport with a few hundred thousand passengers a year, one coffee counter, and a duty-free the size of a living room. There is no floor to build a mall on and no footfall to fill one. On the books, its retail revenue is a rounding error. That airport is exactly who Interlinked was talking to.
Interlinked runs a white-label digital marketplace for airports, built on its Airmall and Nextoor platforms. The idea is that the airport sells goods it never stocks. The passenger browses a catalogue on the airport's own channel before and during the trip, orders, and the fulfilment sits with the brands. As the company presented it on the floor, the catalogue spans roughly 25,000 brands, the marketing emails it sends run at open rates near 70 percent, and the marketplace converts at between 2.5 and 2.8 percent.
Case in point. This is not theory. London Heathrow rebuilt its Reserve and Collect service into a full digital marketplace with the technology firm AOE, putting its roughly 300 brands onto one platform and reporting a major increase in sales, with the strongest revenue coming from high-end goods. Frankfurt and Auckland run the same platform. These are large hubs, but the mechanism is software, not square metres, which is exactly why it scales down to a regional airport that could never justify the floor space.
The same mechanism that sells a fashion brand's goods sells a local food producer's, which is how an airport with no concourse to spare still earns from food and regional products. Food is where this has spread fastest. The marketplace becomes the storefront for products and meals the airport never has to stock.
Case in point. Grab, run by the technology company Servy, operates airport food-ordering marketplaces at major US airports including Los Angeles, Dallas Fort Worth and Chicago O'Hare, and has processed more than 45 million transactions. Passengers order food from their phone and collect it, or have it delivered to the gate, and the airport and its caterers take a share of revenue they would otherwise have lost to a passenger who never had time to queue.
For the airport the appeal is the cost side. It builds nothing physical and carries no inventory. The commercial model, as Interlinked described it, is a one-time build fee, a monthly fee, and a revenue share on every sale, and the representative was explicit that this is not a project costing tens of thousands of euros. His closing line was the one a commercial team should act on: drop me an email.
The quiet importance here is that retail revenue stops depending on floor space and footfall. A small airport with no room for a shop can still run one, because the shop is a screen. The catch is that it is the airport's brand and the airport's passenger relationship doing the selling, so the revenue-share terms and who owns the passenger data are the whole negotiation. This is retail you can switch on without laying a square metre of floor.
ByteTravel, the services around the flight
A passenger needs a visa for where they are going. Another wants lounge access for a long layover, a local data plan, or the tax refund on what they just bought. Every one of those is a service the traveller will buy somewhere. Today almost none of it is bought from the airport, and the airport earns nothing on any of it.
ByteTravel, a Barcelona travel-technology company founded in 2021, builds exactly those services and packages them for partners to resell. Its suite runs across visa processing under the VISAGOV brand, eSIM data under ROAMIC, VIP lounge access at around 1,800 airports, fast-track, tax-free and VAT refunds, travel insurance, and airport transfers. The company is data-driven by design, it watches what travellers search for to decide which service to add next, and it is already profitable, reporting profit before tax of about 3.4 million euros in 2024.
For an airport the model is commission. The airport offers these services through its own channels and keeps a cut of each, in the range of roughly 8 to 15 percent as the arrangement was discussed at the stand, with nothing built or staffed in-house. The company went further on the floor, citing near-total approval rates on its visa product, floating complimentary versions of some services for international passengers in exchange for advertising, and saying plainly that it is open to working directly with governments.
Case in point. Selling lounge access this way is already a mature airport revenue line. The Priority Pass and Collinson model, where an airport or its partners resell access to lounges and to food at the gate, turns dwell time into income at hundreds of airports worldwide. ByteTravel is offering a small airport the same kind of earning without the airport having to build or run a single lounge.
This turns the airport from a place the passenger walks through into a merchant of the trip that surrounds the flight. The visa, the lounge, the data, the refund, all of it was going to be bought anyway. The only question is whether the airport is the one selling it. The terminal becomes a storefront for the whole journey, not just the ninety minutes spent inside it.
The opening for Ukraine's airports
Worth stating plainly, because it is the practical point for this audience. Both companies were speaking to Aviaedge as the representative of Ukraine's airports, and both signalled they are ready to take that conversation forward and to bring their solutions to the reopening. Interlinked asked for the follow-up directly and built its pitch around small and regional airports that earn little from non-aeronautical sources today, which is the exact profile of most of Ukraine's network. ByteTravel said it is open to working with governments and with airports in new markets. Neither of these is a signed partnership, and neither should be reported as one. They are open doors, and open doors are worth walking through in writing while the conference is still fresh.
How the money actually reaches the airport
A showcase is easy. Getting paid cleanly is the part that decides whether any of this is real revenue or a nice slide. Three commercial models were on the floor, and an airport will meet all three.
Revenue share, where the airport takes an agreed percentage of each sale, as with Interlinked. Commission, where the airport earns a cut of each service sold, as with ByteTravel. And fixed fees, a build cost and a monthly subscription, which often sit on top of the other two. The first question to settle is who collects the passenger's money first, because that decides who invoices whom. If the vendor collects, the airport is invoicing the vendor for its share. If the airport collects, it is paying the vendor theirs.
Three things matter more than the headline percentage. First, the settlement cadence and the right to audit, a monthly statement the airport can reconcile against its own traffic and click data, not a number it has to take on trust. Second, data ownership, because in every one of these models the airport's passenger relationship is the asset being monetized, and it must not be signed away. Third, a floor, a minimum guarantee or a recoverable build fee, so the downside is covered if the conversion never arrives.
None of this needs a large finance department. It needs a contract that says clearly who bills, who collects, who reconciles, and how often. For an airport adding its first digital revenue line, that one page of commercial terms is worth more than the platform demo.
What this is worth
The old way to grow non-aeronautical revenue was concrete. Build the terminal, lease the units, wait for the crowd that fills them. Everything on this part of the Dublin floor pointed at a shorter route, and the airports already running it, from Heathrow to a regional terminal selling lunch through a phone, prove the route is real. The shop can be a screen. The services can be someone else's to run. The airport's job is to own the passenger relationship and sign away the right share of it, not the wrong one.
For an airport that is small, regional, or rebuilding from very little, that is the line worth keeping. Non-aeronautical revenue no longer waits for a building. It waits for a signature, a clean settlement, and the discipline to hold on to the one asset that is yours.
The Dublin series. Three dispatches from APEX FTE EMEA and Ancillary & Retailing 2026 in Dublin. Each stands on its own.
Part 1. The Money Has Left the Ticket. Where airline revenue is moving off the ticket to the edges of the trip.
Part 2. The Intelligence Has Moved to the Agent. How AI agents now shop for the passenger, and who ends up owning the customer.
Part 3. The Shop the Airport Never Builds. How an airport can earn from third-party services without building anything. (this dispatch)
Aviaedge is the analytical publication of the Association of Airports of Ukraine, read by airport and airline leadership across Europe.