Where should I actually buy this?
That's the whole product. A traveller knows what they want, and they know which shops they'll walk past. What they don't know is which of those sells it cheapest, or whether it's worth buying at all.
Two sites, one engine
Duty Free Professor consumer
Search products, compare prices across airports, read the guides. This is what we're building first.
Duty Free Awards trade
Stays on WordPress with the other competition sites for now. Its medals feed into the product pages above.
The product page
If we only get one screen right, it's this one. Everything else exists to fill it in.
Price by airport
| Airport | Local price | USD | Availability | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Athens ATH Avolta · Shop Duty Free |
€300.00 | $347.55 Cheapest | In store only | 2h ago |
Frankfurt FRA Gebr. Heinemann |
€309.99 | $359.13 | Pre-order | 2h ago |
London LHR Avolta · World Duty Free |
£272.95 | $369.93 | In stock | 2h ago |
Dublin DUB The Loop · ARI |
€312.00 | $361.42 | In stock | 6 days ago |
Honest freshness
Every price says when it was last checked. Stale data is labelled, never hidden. This is the trust feature.
Sizes are separate
1L and 20cl are different products with different prices. Getting this wrong makes the whole thing look broken.
Medals belong here
Your competition medals, shown at the moment of purchase decision. No other price site can do that.
Browse and search
The front door. Category first, because that's how people shop duty free.
Where the prices come from
This is the part that decides whether the product is good, and the part that can break.
Fetch pages from retailer sites. One adapter per retail platform, not per airport.
Turn each page into the same shape: brand, product, size, ABV, price, currency, stock.
Decide that Dubai's bottle and Heathrow's bottle are the same bottle. The hard part — solved with barcodes.
Every observation kept with a timestamp, so we have price history from day one.
The website, and later alerts, the map, and the API.
Adapters, not one big scraper
A handful of operators run most of the world's airport shops. Each gets a small plug-in module. Adding an airport that runs on an existing platform is configuration, not code.
We take the front door, or we knock
Plenty of these shops publish their catalogue openly. Those we read politely, slowly, and only the pages any traveller can see. If a shop's site turns us away, we take that as a no and add them to the list to talk to instead.
What we can cover, and what nobody can
Reachable today checked, not assumed
- Avolta — one platform, 168 airports in 45 countries. Heathrow and Athens really are the same software.
- Dubai — the world's biggest single duty-free store publishes its whole catalogue openly. 33,871 products with live prices.
- Heathrow's own shop — and it prints the high-street price next to the duty-free one.
- Montreal, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador — small shops, wide open.
Genuinely closed not an engineering problem
- Doha — Qatar Duty Free's website sells raffle tickets, not products.
- Amsterdam, Istanbul — no public storefront at all.
- Frankfurt, Vienna — Heinemann publishes its main catalogue openly, but asks crawlers not to take its per-airport prices. We respect that and ask instead.
- Seoul, Singapore, Paris — partial, awkward, worth a second look later.
Playing it straight
Facts, not writing
We collect prices, sizes, stock and barcodes. We don't take retailers' marketing copy or their photography. Facts are free to use; their words and pictures are theirs.
Never sign in
We only ever read pages any traveller can see without an account. No logins, no accepting anyone's terms. It's the clearest line in this area of law, and we stay well on the safe side of it.
Always credit the shop
Every price links back to the retailer that set it, and we respect the crawling rules each site publishes. We'd rather send them customers than annoy them.
Worth a short conversation with a lawyer before launch — not before a proof of concept. At this size it's a non-issue; at 168 airports refreshed daily it deserves half an hour of proper advice.
When it breaks — and it will
Retailers change their sites and add bot protection. A collector that works today will quietly stop working at some point. So the system watches itself, says which sources are stale, and keeps showing old prices with an honest date rather than pretending. This is ongoing upkeep, not a one-time build — the single most important thing to understand about this project.
Competition medals on the shelf
A price-comparison site anyone can copy. Medals from your own competitions, attached to the exact bottle a traveller is standing in front of, nobody can.
What exists today
- IBC medals — New York, Berlin, Melbourne, Asia. Years of real winners already in the winners system.
- Third-party medals — some retailer pages print IWSC and San Francisco awards next to the price. Capturing those is possible from data we already fetch; it is not built yet, and none are shown today.
What doesn't exist yet
- DFA medals — the Duty Free Awards haven't run. There will be no DFA data at launch, and that's fine.
- The badge slot is built now and fills in automatically when the first DFA results land.
What Kristine and Matt log into
The test is simple: can they run the site every day without a developer? Everything below is designed backwards from that.
Write & publish
Articles, tags, SEO fields, scheduling. Human-written, as you said.
Curate products
Override a bad scraped title, add a better photo, write the editorial verdict, feature something.
Own the accounts
Log-ins live inside your app, so it moves hosts with you. Nothing tied to my server.
Do your writers keep using the WordPress editor they know (with this site pulling the articles in), or do they move into the new back office? Both work. This is a people decision, not a technical one, and it shouldn't be made this week.
What the proof of concept delivers
One week, fixed price. It grew past the original promise — the shape held.
In the proof of concept live now
- Nine retail operations collected across 17 shops, live prices with dates
- Over six thousand real products, 960 comparable airport-to-airport
- Browse, search, product page, and "your airports" — pick where you'll be, every price answers for those shops
- Real IBC medals on real products, matched conservatively
- Freshness dates everywhere
- This walkthrough, the live site, and the build-out spec
Not yet after the review
- The interactive world map
- Price alerts and accounts for visitors
- The full back office and article publishing
- Automatic daily refresh on a schedule
- All 200+ locations — we start with a handful and prove the shape
- Anything touching the competition sites
What I still need from you
- Nothing before you fly. Genuinely. The next thing you have to do is watch a video.
- Whenever convenient: the airports that matter most for Cannes conversations.
- Whether Kristine and Matt should stay in WordPress for writing, or move.