Heathrow's Terminal 2 To Offer Personal Shoppers For Fliers

Natalie Paris, The Daily Telegraph, April 30, 2014

Heathrow Airport has announced plans to become the first airport in the world to offer a personal shopping service, along with details on the wide range of high-end shops, restaurants and cafes to be housed in the £11bn terminal.

Restaurants will include a caviar bar and Heston Blumenthal’s The Perfectionist’s Café, which will feature a wood-burning oven – another world first for the airport. Its aim, according to the Heathrow press office, is to deliver “exceptional food, quickly”.

Terminal 2 closed in 2009, but will be reopened on June 4 by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. It will serve 15.8 million passengers a year from 23 Star Alliance airlines such as Aer Lingus, Germanwings and Virgin’s Little Red.

Dedicated stylists will assist shoppers in selecting new fashions tailored to them in a private suite in the Plaza Premium Lounge. The lounge, which is also equipped with a wellness spa and a champagne bar, will be open to all passengers, regardless of the class of their ticket, but requires a one-off fee of £40 to enter.

Shops in the terminal will have a British focus and include more than 140 brands including Harrods, Paul Smith, Burberry, Bvlgari, Bottega Veneta, Hugo Boss, Cath Kidston and John Lewis, the department store's first outlet in an airport. Complimentary beauty treatments will be available in the duty free area.

An enormous sculpture by the artist Richard Wilson, to be installed at Terminal 2, was unveiled last week. Entitled Slipstream, it is the longest piece of public sculpture in Europe at 78m long.

Telegraph Travel spoke to Wilson who described the aluminium structure as: “a metaphor for travel. It’s about velocity, acceleration and deceleration, which follow it at every undulation of its form.”


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