Hudson, part of the Avolta Group, needed a solution to two challenges: increasing customer return visits to its airport stores and reducing packaging waste. Together with Movopack, the company introduced reusable packaging across 21 airport stores in Italy. Designed to drive footfall back to stores and make a credible sustainability statement, it avoids 0.5 kg of CO₂ emissions when reused or returned in store, and saves water and energy.

About Hudson News

Hudson is a travel retailer specialising in convenience, newsstand, and specialty retail across airports and commuter hubs. As part of Avolta, one of the world's leading travel experience companies, Hudson News serves millions of passengers every year with on-the-go essentials, from snacks and beverages to electronics, books, and regional souvenirs, in major Italian airports including Malpensa, Caravaggio, Fiumicino and others.

The Challenges

In travel retail, the window of opportunity is narrow – passengers move fast, and most purchases are one-time interactions with little reason to return to the same store on the next trip. Hudson wanted to change that by building a mechanism that would give customers a tangible reason to walk back through the door on their next journey.

At the same time, Avolta's broader sustainability commitments called for a meaningful reduction in single-use packaging and promotion of circular practices.

Movopack's Solution

Movopack designed a custom reusable packaging for the 21 Hudson News stores in airports in Italy that served both goals at once.

The bag is built for travel – compact, durable, and fitted with a handle that makes it easy to carry across an entire trip. Its bold branding and large-format logo make it immediately recognisable in any crowd, turning every customer into a walking brand touchpoint far beyond the airport gates.

The return mechanism is what closes the loop. Customers can bring the bag back to any participating Hudson store on their next visit, which is a natural reason to return to the store. For those who prefer it, the bag can also be dropped into any postbox worldwide, with a pre-printed return label already on the packaging. Movopack then collects, cleans, sanitises, and recirculates every bag.

Looking ahead, the system is designed to integrate with Club Avolta, a loyalty program rewarding members with points each time they return a bag and creating an additional incentive layer that connects reuse to customer retention.

The Results

Each packaging returned or reused in store delivers measurable environmental impact:

• 0.5 kg CO₂ emissions avoided

• More than 4L water saved

• 11MJ of energy conserved

Each bag can be reused more than 20 times, having the potential to eliminate hundreds of thousands of single-use bags from the travel retail supply chain, while bringing customers back to Hudson stores trip after trip.