How a Global Travel Retailer Built Retail Media Infrastructure for 2.5 Billion Passenger Journeys

At Avolta’s scale, technology decisions shape how billions of passenger interactions unfold each year. As the company expanded its retail media ambitions, the question became one of infrastructure.

Avolta is the world's leading travel experience company, operating more than 5,100 outlets across approximately 70 countries, spanning duty-free, specialty retail, convenience, and food and beverage concepts including Hudson and Autogrill. Serving an estimated 2.5 billion passengers annually across airports, rail stations, cruise ports, and travel hubs worldwide, Avolta sits at the center of the global travel journey.

Following the combination of Dufry and Autogrill into a unified global identity, Avolta entered a new phase of growth with an explicit ambition: to create a “Travel Experience Revolution.” That meant connecting physical stores, ecommerce, and its Reserve and Collect program, which lets passengers browse and reserve products online for airport pickup, into a single, coherent commerce ecosystem. Its global loyalty program, Club Avolta, sits at the heart of that vision.

Retail media was always going to be part of that picture. The question was whether the infrastructure could match the ambition.

The Challenge

Avolta wasn’t starting from zero. The company had already been running ads within parts of its digital environment. But what existed was limited and fragmented—adequate for isolated markets, not built for a unified global operation.

Scaling retail media across Avolta's footprint introduced a level of complexity that most retailers never encounter. The company operates through multiple regional divisions across Europe, North and South America, Asia-Pacific, and beyond. Each market brings its own assortments, regulatory environments, currencies, and traveler behaviors.

Travel retail adds its own structural layer on top of that. Products need to be available in specific airports or terminals to be relevant. Shopping windows are constrained by departure times. Latency impacts conversion in an environment where passengers are moving through a journey, not browsing at leisure. And digital discovery connects directly to physical pickup through Reserve and Collect, which means ad infrastructure and fulfillment infrastructure have to work together seamlessly.

At this scale, retail media cannot function as an add-on. It has to be embedded directly into commerce infrastructure, flexible enough to adapt across divisions, and performant enough to operate in time-sensitive environments. What Avolta had built internally couldn't do that. What it needed was infrastructure purpose-built for the complexity of global travel commerce.

Why Topsort

Avolta evaluated how different solutions would support its global roadmap.

Rather than adopting a rigid, one-size-fits-all solution, the company prioritized flexibility, transparency, and architectural control.

Key considerations included:

• AI-driven monetization capable of adapting to traveler intent in real time
• Real-time decisioning suited to performance-sensitive travel journeys
• API-first architecture that could integrate across diverse regional ecommerce stacks
• Transparent auction mechanics rather than opaque systems that remove visibility into monetization logic
• A partner whose product development roadmap aligns with Avolta’s growth plans

Building entirely in-house would have required sustained technical investment and specialized retail media expertise that wasn't Avolta's core business. Adopting a rigid off-the-shelf solution risked locking the company into an architecture that couldn't evolve with its omnichannel ambitions.

Topsort offered a third path. Its AI-native auction infrastructure is built for high-intent commerce environments where location, availability, and context shape relevance in real time. Its API-first architecture supports integration across multiple regional ecommerce systems, which is critical for a company operating across 70 countries. And its emphasis on configurability and transparency meant Avolta could maintain control over how monetization logic operates within its ecosystem, rather than ceding that to a black box.

The partnership focuses on embedding monetization directly into Avolta's commerce infrastructure. For a company integrating retail, food and beverage, ecommerce, and loyalty into a unified travel experience, that alignment was central. Selecting a retail media partner at Avolta's scale is not a tactical decision. It is a long-term architectural choice that shapes how monetization evolves across continents.

“Building a scalable and flexible approach to commerce media is a clear priority at Avolta. We were particularly impressed by Topsort’s ability to handle the complexity of our environment — from multiple markets and store formats to the integration of physical and digital touchpoints. We needed infrastructure that could scale globally across our travel retail and food & beverage network, and Topsort stood out in that regard.”

— Richy Ugwu, Global SVP Advertising & Commercialization at Avolta

Going Live

Avolta is now live with Topsort across priority ecommerce markets, with sponsored product placements, location-aware promotions, and performance-driven campaigns running across ecommerce search and product discovery surfaces. The initial deployment established the foundation before extending across the full global footprint—a deliberate sequencing that prioritizes getting the infrastructure right before scaling it wide.

From there, the roadmap includes deeper integration across additional ecommerce markets, with Avolta's Reserve and Collect program and Club Avolta loyalty ecosystem representing natural next horizons as the program matures.

What This Signals for Retail Media

Avolta's move reflects something larger happening across enterprise commerce. Retail media has expanded well beyond traditional ecommerce categories into complex physical-digital ecosystems, including travel, where geography, immediacy, and fulfillment models differ significantly from mass retail.

As operators at this scale mature their retail media programs, infrastructure decisions increasingly center on long-term flexibility, performance, and the ability to integrate with loyalty and omnichannel strategies. A platform that works for a single market in a single category is not the same as one that can operate across 70 countries, multiple retail formats, and billions of annual passenger interactions.

Retail media is no longer an overlay for Avolta. It is infrastructure embedded in digital commerce, designed for performance, and built to scale across markets.

Ready to launch or scale your retail media network with Topsort and unlock immediate monetization. Talk to the Topsort team to get started!