Travel is where hospitality friction shows up quickly. People are watching the clock and looking for ease as they move through unfamiliar spaces. That makes travel a strong environment for innovation, because the customer need is immediate and obvious.

At One Retail, we see frictionless hospitality as a compelling solution for these high-pace moments. When an experience stays simple and reliable in an airport, a station, or a major venue, it becomes easier to apply the same principles in other settings with confidence. 

Frictionless hospitality starts with how people move. In travel, retail often happens in short windows and under real pressure, especially in bus and rail where passengers are passing through rather than dwelling. Airports bring a different rhythm, but the same requirement remains.

Customers need to feel confident that buying will not slow them down. The best results come when the experience is designed around flow, using the right format for the moment and removing the small interruptions that break momentum. 

Frictionless hospitality removes the biggest barrier in retail: checkout. When checkout becomes the bottleneck, everything upstream suffers, including browsing and conversion. Amazon Just Walk Out changes that dynamic by letting customers tap in, take what they want and leave, with payment handled automatically in the background.

The impact is immediate in travel because it reduces uncertainty around time, which is often the reason customers opt out. Through our current frictionless retail spaces, customers move more naturally through checkout-free spaces because the process doesn’t force them into a final pause. Our videos will help bring this to life, but the principle is simple: remove the slowest step and the whole journey becomes easier. 

Not every location needs a full checkout-free store, and frictionless hospitality works best when the solution fits the moment. A major travel hub may justify a walkthrough format because footfall is high and demand is constant. A staff area might need dependable access rather than a large footprint, particularly in back-of-house locations where time is tight. Smaller spaces often benefit from intelligent vending because customers want speed without compromise, and the format can be placed where it solves a real access gap. Hot lockers and click & collect add another option by keeping fresh food available without forcing a wait at a counter.

The most effective frictionless estates are connected, not uniform, because the customer journey isn’t uniform either.

Frictionless hospitality only scales when it works consistently in demanding environments. Compass Group UK & Ireland has taken frictionless models into settings where reliability matters more than novelty, including hospitals, workplaces, sports venues and major events. From the world’s first frictionless hospital store, open 24/7 for NHS staff and visitors, to high-capacity venues processing huge volumes at peak moments, these are proof points that go beyond a single site.

What links these environments is the operational expectation: access needs to hold up when pressure rises. At One Retail, we see this as the strongest argument for travel, because the same principles apply when footfall surges or disruption hits. The outcome is practical: less friction for customers, better access for users and a model that can be repeated.

Every frictionless interaction creates data, and that data is where the model becomes smarter over time. Footfall patterns can reveal where layouts create hesitation and where flow can be improved with small changes. Product choices show what customers actually value in that location, which allows ranges to become more relevant and less wasteful.

Peak demand signals help refine forecasting, which protects availability when the environment is under strain. Our data and analytics platform, E15, is a key part of making frictionless hospitality scalable because it supports ongoing improvement after launch. The customer doesn’t need to think about the technology, but they feel the benefit as the experience becomes faster and more dependable. 

One Retail can solve modern travel retail challenges with flexible, consumer-first approaches that can be applied across multiple environments. The formats may change from hub to hub, or from travel to healthcare, but the promise stays consistent.

Make access simple, reduce delay and design the experience around how people move. With Compass Group UK & Ireland already delivering frictionless hospitality across sectors, the opportunity now is to connect those capabilities into journeys that feel seamless from start to finish.