GLOBAL BLUE

Stefano Rizzi, Global Blue Country Manager, Explains Trends of Tax-free Shopping

Global Blue is the forerunner of the Tax-Free Shopping concept with 35 million of business deals a year: a special procedure allowing non-EU citizens to claim VAT refunds on all purchases over a certain amount. Global Blue provides technology solutions for foreign currency exchange, to allow international buyers to buy with their own currency, improving their customer experience, while it offers retailers innovative technology solutions, including digital receipts and e-commerce returns, digitizing processes across the entire omnichannel customer experience.

Thanks to its daily monitoring of flows and deals, Global Blue can achieve an updated overview of the trend of Tax-Free Shopping.

Stefano Rizzi, Country Manager of Global Blue, gives us an all-inclusive look at the topic.

“Tax Free Shopping is increasingly growing exceeding the pre-pandemic level in continental Europe, as well as in Italy and in Lombardy.

The Fashion Week 2022 in Milan showed how international events are a key catalyst for incoming tourism: an exceptional result, higher than those prepandemic as regards the values of the tax-free expenditure conducted by non-EU citizens, even if Russians were absent and Chinese had a lower impact.”

What are the origin markets of customers using tax free shopping in Lombardy and Milan?

Americans and Arabs were the undisputed protagonists of tax-free shopping in Italy in 2022. As for the recovery of tax-free spending, tourists from Singapore have even tripled what was done in 2019. As regards average receipts, the British must be taken into account with about 2,033 euro: even higher than 1,703 euro of Americans (+41%).

Could you separate the spending sectors, such as fashion, design, food?

Global Blue, thanks to its always updated monitoring of deals, can easily detect what are the favoured product sectors of buyers. So, we can say that both Fashion&Clothing and Watches&Jewellery have achieved higher values compared with pre-pandemic period. In particular, the increase in the average receipt of Watches&Jewellery (+54%), whose absolute value reached 7,412 euros, is significant.