Luxury, vintage sales are rising on cruise ships
Travel retail is outperforming despite macro headwinds: Starboard Group beat its 2025 budget across 90+ cruise ships and 700+ brands, with fine jewelry exceeding annual sales targets by 19% and pre-owned luxury watches/handbags hitting record numbers. Impulse buying in duty-free climbed from 28% to 31% YoY per the Duty-Free World Council's 2025 report, while value perception of duty-free rose from 25% to 27%. The pre-owned luxury resale channel is expanding aggressively into travel retail, with Reklaim targeting 15-20 cruise ship deployments by H2 2026. This signals a high-intent, low-price-sensitivity buyer segment that is actively spending on luxury and pre-owned goods outside of digital marketplaces.
The non-obvious play: travel retail's growth in pre-owned luxury and lab-grown diamonds directly competes with eBay's and Amazon's luxury/resale channels for the same high-LTV customer — but in a zero-ad-spend, zero-fee environment.
If brands like Reklaim are locking up distribution on cruise ships and airports before digital platforms do, that's a competitive moat being built in physical retail that erodes the addressable resale buyer pool on eBay Authenticity Guarantee and Amazon Luxury Stores.
For a $10M/year seller in watches, handbags, or fine jewelry: Monday morning, pull your eBay and Amazon resale listings' conversion rate trends for Q1 2026 and check if average order value is compressing — if it is, the affluent buyer is increasingly converting at the point of travel, not at home on a screen.
Lab-grown diamond velocity on Amazon should be audited now for any margin compression from new physical competitors entering high-traffic luxury travel corridors.
This is part of a broader 2026 trend of luxury and pre-owned brands deliberately diversifying away from digital marketplace dependency — using high-trust, high-dwell-time physical environments (cruise ships, airports) to capture the same affluent buyer at higher margins with zero platform fees.
For marketplace operators, this represents accelerating competitive moat erosion in the luxury and resale categories specifically, as brands build direct consumer relationships in channels Amazon and eBay cannot monetize or control.
The 31% impulse buy rate in travel retail also underscores that the discovery-driven purchase — the core value prop of Amazon's Browse and TikTok Shop's feed — is being replicated effectively offline, which should sharpen every agency's urgency around owning the digital 'discovery to purchase' funnel before more wallet share migrates to experiential retail.
Pull your Amazon Brand Analytics 'Repeat Purchase Behavior' report for jewelry, watches, and handbags SKUs — if repeat purchase rate dropped more than 5% QoQ in Q1 2026, you're losing high-LTV buyers to experiential retail channels like cruise and duty-free; respond by launching 'occasion-based' bundling (gift sets, milestone gifting collections) to recapture intent on platform.
On eBay, check your Authenticity Guarantee listings' sell-through rate for pre-owned watches and handbags this week — if sell-through has declined while your price point held steady, test a 'travel-ready' or 'gift-ready' listing angle with updated imagery and copy targeting milestone gifting, since that's the emotional trigger driving spend in physical travel retail right now.
In the next 30-60 days, prepare for lab-grown diamond and pre-owned luxury watch brands to increase their wholesale and direct channel investment in physical travel retail, which will tighten inventory supply available to third-party Amazon and eBay resellers — audit your supplier agreements now and lock in forward inventory commitments before brands redirect allocation to cruise and airport retail partnerships.
Bottom Line
Travel retail is eating luxury resale's high-LTV buyer — if your jewelry or watch margins are softening in Q1, now you know why.
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Useful background context, but lower-priority than direct platform, community, or operator intelligence.
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Travel retail is eating luxury resale's high-LTV buyer — if your jewelry or watch margins are softening in Q1, now you know why.
Key Stat / Trigger
Fine jewelry exceeded 2025 cruise ship sales targets by 19%
Focus on the operational implication, not just the headline.
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Global Retail // March 20, 2026 Luxury, vintage sales are rising on cruise ships By Melissa Daniels Starboard Travelers are increasingly splurging on luxury goods on cruise ships and airport duty-free shops, as vacations become a prime opportunity for special purchases and impulse buys.
Starboard Group, a company that’s operated cruise ship retail for over 65 years, beat its budget in 2025 and also saw record sales in pre-owned luxury watches and handbags. Starboard’s retail presence includes more than 700 brands sold on over 90 ships on 14 different lines.
Lisa Bauer, president and CEO at Starboard Group, said she likes to say that retailers aboard cruise ships “sell everything from Pringles to Prada.” And despite a tenuous U. S. economic landscape, Bauer said the “special occasion” factor helps drive spending during trips.
“While the macro environment definitely plays a role, I think it has less impact on the cruise industry in particular because people save for that and they want something to remember it,” she said. “The cruise industry got hit very, very hard [by Covid-19], but it is incredibly resilient. People love to cruise, so they come back again and again.”
The Duty-Free World Council, the industry association for the duty-free industry, this month released its 2025 report on the travel retail landscape, which showed a rise in impulsive shopping behavior and people seeing greater value in duty-free shopping. About 31% of travelers bought on impulse, compared to 28% the prior year.
And 27% of shoppers said duty-free is a good value for the money, compared to 25% last year. The DFWC report also showed that nearly two-thirds of travel shoppers look for products they’ve never bought before, as well as unique products.
“This emphasizes that retailers must not only provide value but also a sense of discovery that cannot be found on the high street,” said a press release statement from Peter Mohn, CEO of M1nd-Set, the research agency that produced the study. Reklaim, a luxury handbag and watch reseller, has eight airport shops in places like Lisbon, Geneva and Dubai.
It’s also aiming to sell on 15-20 cruise ships by the second half of the year. Reklaim’s president, Gary Schoenfeld, said part of why the travel portion of the business continues to grow is that people have time to consider their purchase and engage with a salesperson. “When we’re home and working, we’re all attached to our phones and computers,” he said.
“Vacation is more liberating, and it gives you time to think about what you want to do to enjoy it.” Schoenfeld also said people tend to shop for special occasions during their travels, whether attending a wedding, a show or a fancy dinner.
Many people take big international trips or cruises to celebrate milestones like birthdays or anniversaries, which dovetail as gifting opportunities for spouses and loved ones. “People like the idea of having something special while they’re traveling,” he said.
Like, ‘I’d really enjoy wearing that watch right now,’ or ‘having that handbag to use while traveling.’” Starboard’s sales data supports the idea that travel retail is thriving due to its alignment with a special occasion: Fine jewelry was the top-selling category in 2025, exceeding the year’s sales target by 19%.
Lab-grown diamonds in particular have exploded in popularity, Bauer said. But the company also recently rolled out a pop-up natural diamond category on the Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas to experiment with driving more jewelry sales.
Outside of the luxury category, cruise ship logo merchandise outperformed expectations in 2025, and the company is also doing more with personalization stations for embroidery and engraving on apparel and accessories. Starboard also launched ear-piercing stations last year.
But Bauer said the retail opportunity is still something of an afterthought to some brands. Non-cruisers tend to have the perception that the trips are for “the nearly dead, overfed or newlywed,” she said.
To help overcome stereotypes, Bauer said she and her team will give tours on cruise ships to potential brand partners that may not be familiar with the industry.
The goal, she said, is to show them how many demographics are part of the cruising market and drive home the shopping behaviors of what is essentially a captive audience of 13 million unique consumers. Last year, the retailer brought in 65 new brands, Bauer said. It expanded fragrance offerings to include high-end brands like Montale, Mancera and Tom Ford.
Other new brands included lifestyle brand Blue Stallion Farm, beauty hair-care company Briogeo and a Clarins boutique on board the Virgin Voyages’ Brilliant Lady. Existing brands can also use the cruise shops to debut limited editions or exclusives that resonate with guests looking for something special. Pop-ups for whiskey tastings, makeup applicatio
Original Source
This briefing is based on reporting from Modern Retail. Use the original post for full primary-source context.
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