Colm McLoughlin
Paying tribute to a travel retail titan
Dubai Duty Free Executive Vice Chairman and CEO Colm McLoughlin this week announced his retirement, effective 31 May. We pay tribute to a great leader, pioneer and statesman of the travel retail industry.
Colm McLoughlin, the driving force behind Dubai Duty Free’s rise to become the largest single airport duty-free operation in the world, this week announced his retirement after an extraordinary 55 years in travel retail.
He brings down the curtain on a pioneering, memorable career on 31 May, but will retain an advisory role. He will attend sponsored sporting events and will remain as Chairman of the Dubai Duty Free Foundation.
Chief Operating Officer Ramesh assumes the leadership reins as Managing Director, supported by the highly experienced Salah Tahlak as Deputy Managing Director.
McLoughlin noted, “I want to extend my sincere thanks to all of our management and staff who have supported me so well. A huge thanks of course to our Chairman, H.H. Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, who has been a wonderful boss to me for all these years and who I know will give the same level of support to my successor.
“Longevity is a key factor in the success of Dubai Duty Free and both Ramesh and Salah are great examples of this. I am confident that Dubai Duty Free will continue to grow and I see a very bright future for the operation.”
It is almost impossible to overstate McLoughlin’s contribution to the travel retail sector, to Dubai Duty Free and indeed to Dubai itself.
By remarkable and poignant coincidence, his retirement takes effect a day before the anniversary of his entry to the travel retail industry. For it was on 1 June 1969 that he took up a post as Special Assistant to Freeport Shops General Manager Bill Maloney at Shannon Airport (the birthplace of the airport duty-free industry in 1947 under the leadership of Dr Brendan O’Regan), Ireland.
In later years he became synonymous with the extraordinary rise and rise of Dubai Duty Free to become the most famous travel retail brand on the planet. Yet when a group of Irish executives from state-owned Aer Rianta arrived in Dubai in October 1983 on a six-month consultancy project to advise the Dubai government on the creation of an airport duty-free enterprise, none surely could have envisaged what lay ahead.
A key member of that team was Colm McLoughlin. He came expecting a half-year stint in the desert sands and never left.
Colm McLoughlin: An extraordinary travel retail career
When he first walked into Dubai International Airport all those years ago, what did Colm McLoughlin see? “It was a very small airport with just two conveyor belts,” he recalled in an interview with The Moodie Davitt Report. “It was massively congested with 3 million passengers going through a building that was built for just 750,000.” Last year Dubai International was the world’s third-busiest hub.
“On this [airport] side of town there were no buildings, four or five hotels at most, a poor taxi service and little public social activity,” he remembers.
Back then there were 100 employees, management and staff. Today there are close to 6,000. Sales in the first full year of operations were US$20 million – in 2023 they reached more than US$2 billion.
The changes that have taken place in Dubai have been momentous but are all driven by an attitude of positivity and progress, as McLoughlin noted in an interview with us last year for a special commemorative book to mark Dubai Duty Free’s 40th anniversary.
“The government of Dubai has been very positive and even in 1983 the attitude was about improvement, building up and success. And that continues to be the case,” he told us.
Typically, he played down his own role in the success of that story, attributing it to quality of people who drive the operation forward.
“The biggest ingredient for Dubai Duty Free is the dedication and effort of all our staff,” he said. “All of our senior team have been many years with us and they are as dedicated as you would find in any operation. We all work very closely together. And it’s fair to say that if I was trying to find the biggest single reason for our success, apart from the traffic growth, it would be the dedication of all the staff but particularly the senior team.”
Dubai Duty Free is the recipient of over 780 awards, of which 86 have been attributed to McLoughlin directly.
Many of these recognise Dubai Duty Free’s pioneering work in marketing, sponsorship and CSR which each has its own platform in the company’s sustained excellence as a business.
Colm with wife Breeda as he accepts The Moodie Report (now The Moodie Davitt Report) Award for Outstanding Career Contribution to Airport Commercial Business in 2007
“We have always tried new things,” said McLoughlin in the 40th anniversary title. “For example, we started a tennis tournament, at the time in a temporary stadium, before we built our own properly designed Tennis Stadium.
“The ladies tournament joined the men’s in 2001, and I’m delighted to reconfirm that Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championship was the first tournament in the world apart from the majors that paid equal prize money to women and men. I am always very happy we did that.
McLoughlin has long spearheaded the company’s strategy to give back to the most needy in society, with a particular focus on children.
“We formed the Dubai Duty Free Foundation in 2004 and since that time, we have supported charities in 28 different countries. We have spent AED127 million (US$35 million) on various charities in those countries. We can very happily say we restored people’s eyesight, we funded cleft palate operations and have done many, many different things.”
Looking ahead, the company remains in good hands. Ramesh Cidambi joined Dubai Duty Free in October 1988 and is among the longest-serving members of the team.
During his stellar career with the travel retailer, Cidambi has held a variety of senior positions with responsibility for areas such as information technology, logistics, retail development and the Dubai Duty Free Leisure business through the Jumeirah Creekside Hotel and The Irish Village Bar and Restaurant. His trajectory through various management roles to become Chief Operating Officer in 2016 is emblematic of the retailer’s drive to promote talent from within.
Salah Tahlak joined the airport retailer in 1992 and was one of the first Emiratis and US graduates to join the organisation. He went on to head up the Marketing division and became Tournament Director of the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships in 2003.
He was the first Arab national to be on the Council of both the ATP and WTA. In 2016 he became Executive Vice President for Corporate Services responsible for Marketing, IT, Logistics and Corporate Security and in 2022 was appointed as Joint COO.
*Turn to the next page for a series of industry tributes to Colm McLoughlin.
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The Moodie Davitt eZine
Issue 334 | 12 May 2024
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