Japanese Whisky Is Winning the Airport
Whisky / Data
Japanese Whisky Is Winning the Airport
New IWSR travel-retail data shows Japanese whisky value up 44% in 2025 and volumes up 37%, while Cognac suffered one of its worst declines in decades. Duty free is the clearest window there is into what premium travellers actually buy, and the picture it shows is a generational handover.
By Vim, Editor of 12×75
In brief
- IWSR’s 2025 global travel retail analysis: combined spirits and wine volumes up 5%, spirits value up 7% and volume up 6%. The channel is outperforming domestic markets.
- Japanese whisky value rose 44%, with volumes up 37%, the standout performance in the data.
- Whisky overall was the dominant growth driver, up 12% in value. Scotch and American whiskey both grew 10%, Irish 11%.
- Agave spirits: volume up 10%, value up 28%. Vodka volume up 7% with double-digit value growth, helped by flavoured variants and drinkers switching from gin.
- Cognac and brandy: volume down 6%, value down 8%, which IWSR called one of its worst declines in several decades. Flavoured gin fell as drinkers moved to vodka and RTDs. Prosecco saw both volume and value fall.
Duty free is the most honest room in the drinks industry. Nobody buys a bottle at an airport because a distributor pushed it, a bar recommended it or a supermarket put it on promotion. They buy it because they have an hour to kill, a bit of disposable income, and a specific idea of what is worth carrying home. Strip out the machinery of normal retail, the promotions, the fights over shelf space, and what is left is preference, expressed with money.
Which is why IWSR’s new global travel retail numbers are worth more attention than the average trade data release. The headline is that Japanese whisky grew 44% by value in a single year. The more interesting story, and the one with consequences for the whole premium end, is what fell, because Cognac has just had one of its worst years in decades in precisely the channel that made it.
The numbers
Global travel retail, 2025, by category
CategoryValueVolume
Japanese whisky+44% value+37% volume
Agave spirits+28% value+10% volume
Whisky, all types+12% value
Irish whiskey+11% value
Scotch whisky+10% value
American whiskey+10% value
VodkaDouble-digit value+7% volume
RumValue up−6% volume
ChampagneValue upVolume down
ProseccoValue downVolume down
Cognac and brandy−8% value−6% volume
Source: IWSR Global Travel Retail analysis, published September 2026. Spirits overall: volume up 6%, value up 7%. Combined spirits and wine volumes up 5%.
Charlotte Reid, IWSR’s senior insights manager for global travel retail, put it plainly: “In global travel retail, traditional spirits categories are being challenged by rapid shifts in consumer preferences.” And more pointedly: “Japanese whisky and agave spirits surged, while Cognac suffered one of its worst declines in several decades. Flavoured gin also fell as consumers migrated towards vodka and RTDs.”
Two categories that barely existed in duty free twenty years ago are now growing at 44% and 28%. The category that defined the channel is down 8%.
Why Japanese whisky is winning
A 44% value rise on 37% volume growth tells you something specific: people are buying more of it and paying more per bottle. That is the healthiest possible shape for a category, and it is being driven by a set of conditions that almost perfectly match what an airport sells.
Japanese whisky is scarce, and scarcity travels. It is genuinely difficult to find at a normal retail price in Britain or America, which makes a duty-free shelf carrying a decent selection feel like an opportunity rather than a transaction. It is visually distinctive on a shelf. It carries a strong association with craftsmanship, which is what people want when buying a present or a treat. And it is priced in the band, roughly £60 to £200, where a traveller will make an impulse decision they would think harder about at home.
Above all it is the category people cannot get. The scarcity engine I keep writing about works better in duty free than anywhere else on earth, because the shopper is in a place they visit rarely, with a deadline, holding a currency they have already mentally spent.
One caveat on Japanese whisky. Labelling rules tightened in recent years after a long period in which whisky bottled in Japan was not always distilled there. If you are buying at an airport, the things to check are the distillery name and whether the label makes a clear statement about Japanese distillation. A bottle that says only “product of Japan” is telling you less than you might assume.
Agave’s duty-free story is different from its home one
Agave spirits grew 10% in volume and 28% in value, which is the trade-up signal again and a striking contrast with what is happening in America. In US retail, tequila’s growth has concentrated in the $20 to $35 range while premium brands soften. In duty free the opposite applies: people are buying fewer bottles at higher prices.
That makes sense once you think about who is standing in the shop. Nobody carries a $25 blanco through an airport. The duty-free tequila purchase is a gift, a special occasion or a collector buying something unavailable at home, and that skews the entire channel toward the top of the range. The same category can therefore be trading down domestically and trading up internationally at the same time, which is a useful corrective to anyone reading a single dataset as the whole truth.
It also reflects mezcal and the wider agave world arriving properly in travel retail, where five years ago there was Patrón, Don Julio and not much else. If you want the ground truth on which bottles justify the money, the best tequila guide has it.
Cognac’s bad year is the real headline
Value down 8%, volume down 6%, and IWSR describing it as one of the category’s worst declines in several decades. For most spirits that would be a difficult year. For Cognac, in travel retail, it is closer to an identity crisis.
Duty free built Cognac. The category’s modern business was constructed on Asian travellers, gifting culture and the airport as a place where an expensive bottle of brandy made obvious sense. That machine has been sputtering for a while, and the IWSR regional breakdown shows why: Asia Pacific was the weakest region in the data, described as a lacklustre spirits performance despite strong growth in India, while Europe and Africa/Middle East both grew 11% and the Americas 7%.
When a category is that concentrated in one region and one occasion, a downturn in either is existential rather than cyclical. And the projection is not much cheerier: IWSR expects Cognac and brandy to be essentially flat in value through to 2030, while Scotch dominates the growth opportunity and Japanese whisky and Irish whiskey lead the momentum.
Cognac did not lose duty free to a competitor. It lost the customer that duty free was built around.
The quieter signals
Gin is losing drinkers to vodka
Flavoured gin fell, and IWSR is explicit about where those drinkers went: vodka and RTDs. Vodka volumes rose 7% with double-digit value growth, helped by flavoured variants and switching out of gin in core European markets. After a decade in which every bar in Britain built a gin wall, that is a meaningful reversal, and it matches what the can data has been saying: the flavoured, easy, low-effort end of drinking has moved to vodka and to ready-to-drink formats.
Rum is shrinking but getting better
Volumes down 6%, value up, led by dark variants. That is a category losing casual drinkers and keeping serious ones, which is not the worst outcome and is roughly what happened to Scotch in the 1980s.
Champagne up in value, Prosecco down in both
Champagne sold fewer bottles for more money, which is the pattern across the luxury end of the category. Prosecco fell on both measures, and IWSR used the phrase “Prosecco fatigue”, which is the first time I have seen that in a serious dataset rather than a think piece. If you want the difference between the two explained properly, that is here.
What it means if you buy at the airport
Some practical translation, because data is only useful if it changes what you do.
Duty free is genuinely good for Japanese whisky, and that is not a coincidence of pricing so much as of range. The selection in a major Asian or European hub is frequently better than anything on your local high street, and travel-retail exclusives are real rather than marketing. This is the category where the airport shop earns its reputation.
It is rarely good value for Scotch or gin. Both grew in the data, but growth is not the same as a bargain, and the mainstream bottles on an airport shelf are usually available at home for similar money or less. My best whiskey and best gin picks are mostly easier to buy at a decent shop.
Cognac may become the value play, precisely because it is struggling. A category with falling volumes and flat projections tends to become more generous on price and promotion, and the liquid has not got worse because the market went off it. That is the same argument I make about unfashionable wine, and it works here too.
And check the litre bottles. Travel retail often sells one-litre formats that do not exist in domestic retail, which is where the actual saving usually hides, rather than in the headline price.
The last word
Every few years a dataset comes along that captures a handover cleanly, and this is one. The category that built the airport shop is having one of its worst decades, while two categories that were barely stocked twenty years ago are growing at 44% and 28%. That is not a blip in preference. It is a different traveller with different reference points buying different things.
What I find most telling is the shape of the growth. Japanese whisky grew value faster than volume. Agave grew value nearly three times faster than volume. Rum lost volume and gained value. Champagne sold less and earned more. Across almost every category in the data, people bought fewer bottles and spent more on each one, which is the single most consistent trend in drinks right now and the reason the industry’s volume problems and its premium successes keep appearing in the same report.
Fewer bottles, better bottles. That is the whole of the 2025 data in four words, and it is happening at 30,000 feet as much as it is at home.
Sources
- BeverageDaily: IWSR, emerging spirits categories reshape global travel retail, September 21, 2026
- The Spirits Business: GTR, Japanese whisky up 44% as Cognac slumps, including the Charlotte Reid quotes
- The Spirits Post: travel retail analysis, September 18, 2026
All figures are IWSR’s 2025 global travel retail data as reported in the trade press, covering the duty-free and travel-retail channel only; they do not describe domestic retail, where category performance differs. Projections to 2030 are IWSR’s. Correct as of September 25, 2026. Please drink responsibly.
