Duty Free?

I have been traveling quite a bit recently and indeed, I am just back from London. Me being me, I couldn’t help wondering why we still call the shops in airports duty free? Plainly, they are not or if they are, something else is wrong. I ended up asking the manager of one such store why, if the store was duty free, could I buy Maltesers much cheaper in the High St.? He didn’t seem to know so I asked about cigarettes – same price as the High St. Well, inside the EU apparently, duty free isn’t duty free anymore. It is my friends a con and I counted several items in a duty free that were more than 20% more expensive than the corner store near my Hotel in central London.

I also asked in WH Smiths why I needed to furnish my boarding pass to buy sweets? They didn’t seem to know but they agreed that their store was NOT duty free. I made a little bit of a scene to be honest and in the end was told that there was no requirement whatsoever to show the boarding pass as it was used by them to track who bought what…..

So there you go. Duty free isn’t and your boarding pass is only required to help them market to you….

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