Across busy transport environments, coffee has become a high performing category in travel retail, with cafés serving millions of passengers every year. Stopping at a rail café, airport café or station café is no longer simply for convenience, but part of the journey. As passenger numbers continue to recover and travel hubs evolve into destinations in their own right, cafés are playing an increasingly central role in shaping the traveller experience. 

High footfall, repeat customers and relatively short dwell times in travel hubs create an environment where quick, familiar purchases thrive, making coffee an ideal grab-and-go product. Morning commuter peaks generate predictable demand for station cafés and rail cafés. 

Airports present a different opportunity. With longer dwell times before boarding, an airport café can serve both passengers in a hurry and travellers looking for a moment to relax before their flight. In these environments, an airport café can become a space where people recharge or prepare for their journey. Coffee also supports strong secondary sales. Pastries, breakfast items and snacks are natural companions to coffee purchases, helping increase basket size and strengthening the overall food-to-go offer within rail cafés, station cafés and airport cafés.

Successful travel cafés balance speed, quality and brand recognition. Travellers typically make decisions quickly, so familiar and trusted brands play an important role in encouraging purchases. Increasingly, operators are combining well-known coffee brands with distinctive concepts tailored to specific travel environments. This approach delivers both reliability and a sense of place within busy transport hubs.

At Glasgow Airport, we partnered with Costa Coffee to create a café concept tailored to the realities of travel. Alongside coffee and light bites, passengers can order via self-service kiosks or click and collect through the Costa app for a seamless, on-the-go experience. Dedicated spaces to work and recharge devices make it easy to stay productive while moving through the airport.

Retail and hospitality spaces in stations and airports are often the first interaction travellers have with the place they are visiting, meaning café brands can play an important role in shaping that first impression. Many travel operators are now selecting rail, station and airport café concepts that reflect the culture and character of the destination. This creates a stronger sense of arrival for visitors while also providing familiar and relevant brands for local commuters.

Grind at Waterloo Station offers a strong example. Originally founded in Shoreditch, the brand brings its distinctive London aesthetic into one of the UK’s busiest rail hubs, creating a station café experience that reflects the energy and rhythm of the city throughout the day. By introducing brands like Grind into major transport hubs, operators can create spaces that feel rooted in their surroundings, capturing the buzz of the city rather than defaulting to a generic travel environment.

As passenger expectations evolve, partnerships between travel operators and hospitality brands are becoming increasingly important. These collaborations allow operators to combine high-street brand familiarity with offers tailored to fast-moving transport environments. For travellers, this means cafés that feel both trusted and well-suited to the pace of travel.

Our partnerships demonstrate how travel cafés can combine strong brand recognition with formats designed for transport environments. At Waterloo Station, the introduction of Grind brought a distinctive London coffee brand into one of the UK’s busiest rail hubs, creating a rail café that reflects the character and energy of the city’s commuter culture. At Glasgow Airport, Costa Coffee offers a familiar airport café experience tailored to the needs of passengers navigating a busy travel environment.

Several trends are shaping the next generation of travel cafés. Premiumisation is one of the most visible. Travellers increasingly expect barista-quality coffee whether visiting a rail café, station café or airport café. The gap between travel locations and high-street coffee shops continues to narrow, as expectations around quality, provenance and consistency continue to rise. At the same time, convenience remains critical. Digital ordering, contactless payment and self-service technology are helping travellers access coffee more quickly, reducing queues and supporting a smoother passenger journey. There is also growing demand for a stronger sense of place. Café concepts that reflect the culture of their destination can help travel hubs feel more connected to their surroundings and more memorable for visitors.

As travel hubs continue to evolve into sophisticated retail environments, cafés are becoming an increasingly important part of the passenger journey. Whether it’s a commuter stopping for a rail café coffee, a traveller visiting a station café, or a passenger relaxing in an airport café, coffee remains one of the most consistent and valuable categories across the travel environment.

At One Retail, we see this every day across the locations we operate. By combining carefully chosen brand partnerships, data-led retail strategies and concepts tailored to individual sites, we aim to ensure our cafés deliver both strong commercial performance and a positive passenger experience. In doing so, we believe rail cafés, station cafés and airport cafés will continue to play a central role in the future of travel retail.