About Metropolitan Duty Free

In 1998, on the flight home from Tenerife to Düsseldorf, I had a duty-free allowance I couldn't spend. Not for lack of trying. The trolley simply held nothing worth buying: a few cheap watches, some perfume, and that was the end of it. I landed with my allowance unused. Not because I didn't want to buy something, but because no one had given me anything worth buying.

That small annoyance turned out to be a very large one. Every year roughly a billion international travellers carry an allowance they're entitled to use, and most of them never do. The reason isn't a lack of interest. It's that the offer at the gate is narrow, rarely cheaper than online, and bought in a hurry. The right to shop tax-free is real. The chance to use it properly, until now, has not been.

Metropolitan Duty Free exists to close that gap. We make using your allowance straightforward, fairly priced and unrushed: a broad international range of premium and luxury brands, chosen and ordered before you fly, then delivered to your hotel, your airport, or your lounge. You decide in your own time, not in the three minutes before boarding. And the saving belongs to you, in full. We pass on the entire tax advantage to the traveller rather than keeping a share of it, the way the old refund intermediaries do.

The network is built as an international franchise, each destination usually represented by its airport. Every destination admits only authorised brand retailers, so what reaches you is genuine, with verified origin. And together with the customs authorities we developed a process that takes the paperwork off your hands: every document is prepared for you, handed over ready, and available to retrieve at any time.

We also give a stage to regional craftsmanship. Through Metropolitan's reach, local makers find travellers who would otherwise never have discovered them.

A journey is worth remembering. That's why many of our pieces carry the mark of where they were found, "Rome 2026", "San Francisco 2026". Years later it isn't only an object. It's the trip.

— Gunther Bernecker, Founder