# How to read an airport shopping guide

A good airport guide is not a list of shops. It is a map of decisions you have to make under time pressure, arranged so you can make them before you arrive. Every airport page on this site is built to the same shape, and knowing the shape means you can read any of them in about two minutes.

## Start with the terminal, not the airport

Large airports are several retail environments wearing one name. Terminals are frequently run by different concession holders, carry different ranges and price differently. If your boarding pass says a terminal, read that terminal's section and skip the rest. If you are connecting, you may pass through more than one, and the second is often the better one.

## Airside, landside and arrivals

Airside is past security, and it is where the duty free shelf is. Landside shops before security sell at ordinary domestic prices with the tax on. Arrivals shops, where the country runs them, let you buy after landing, which saves carrying a heavy bag through a connection. The guide says which of these exist, because an arrivals hall changes the plan entirely.

## Opening hours, and the first flight problem

An airport is open before its shops are. Early departures and late arrivals routinely find the shutters down, and the listed hours are the retailer's, not the terminal's. Where we have hours we show them with where they came from, because an hour taken from a retailer's own page and an hour taken from a sign photographed last year are not the same claim.

## The shelf itself

The heart of the page is what is actually on sale and what it costs, bottle by bottle, with the date each price was observed. Read it as a set of observations rather than a price list: a price from last week is a strong guide, a price from three months ago is a weak one, and the date is printed so you can tell which you are looking at. Categories are broken out so you can go straight to the shelf you care about.

## The comparison is the point

A single airport page tells you what one shop asks. The value arrives when you put two or three of them side by side, because the same bottle at the same retailer routinely differs between airports. Tell the site which airports you will pass through and every price is compared across exactly those shops: [set your airports](/savings). Then [browse the airports](/airports) you are less sure about.

## What a guide will not tell you

It will not tell you what your loyalty tier is worth, what the shop is holding back for a promotion next week, or whether the assistant will find you the last bottle of something in the stockroom. Those are the reasons to leave yourself twenty minutes rather than five.