Spice Shopping Centre celebrated its 10th anniversary
As a part of celebration of its first jubilee, Spice Shopping Centre held an opening ceremony of a unique object of interest – the six meters high „Monument of a Shopping Angel“, organized a traditional shopping festival and encouraged the promotion of shopping tourism in Riga.
During its 10 years of operation, Spice Shopping Centre has been visited by more than 56.4 million customers, thus creating a stable and loyal clients for the centre. In addition to the customers of Riga and close surroundings, Spice Shopping Centre is paying much attention also to the tourists visiting Riga.
“The main advantage of Spice is its location. Situated at the distance of only 5 minutes from the international airport, we are the first to welcome the visitors. Open communication policy and eye-catching offers of the centre are essential factors. Spice provides a broad range of new fashion brands. We seek innovations on fashion market, in order to offer the newest trends to our customers”, said Iveta Lace, the Chairman of the Management Board of Spice Shopping Centre.
Spice Home, the largest store in Baltic countries specialized on home and interior products, is the place providing any necessary elements and goods of interior design for turning a house or flat into a home. Local as well as foreign customers can enjoy affordable prices. Spice shopping festivals are highly popular. Within the framework of this year’s shopping festival, on the magic date of 11.11.11 Spice organized its fifth annual shopping night, attracting approximately 60 000 visitors. „In search of originality, we erected a unique and provocative monument of a shopping angel right next to the shopping centre. It is vigorous, peculiar and amusing. If we want to be a pearl among other centres, we need to apply such ideas,” Iveta Lace added.
Iveta Lace also stresses the positive development trends of shopping tourism of Riga: “We collect and analyse the information about tax-free shopping in Spice on regular basis and the results seem to be pleasing – they show continuous tendency of growth. In the third quarter of 2011 the highest number of tax-free purchases were made by tourists in Spice Shopping Centre. As tax-free services are used only by the persons who are not residents of the member states of the European Union, it can be concluded that the general situation is even better and the number of foreign clients is still higher.”
“In 2011 the total sum of tax-free purchases made in the stores of Riga has increased by 91% and during the first three quarters of the year 575 000 LVL were compensated to foreign customers. In the first three quarters the foreign customers spent 4.5 million LVL with tax-free shopping service, of which 3 million LVL were spent by our neighbours from Russia. 62% of all purchases made by tourists were completed in retail centres, among which Spice was the most popular shopping place,” says Vineta Kalmane, the manager of Global Blue Latvia.
Tourism is a leading field in the export services of Latvia. The statistics of 2011 shows that this year saw the record number of foreign visitors in Latvia. In the first six months the hotels and other accommodation institutions served 444 930 foreign visitors, which means growth by almost a third, compared to the previous year. Suring their stay in Latvia, the tourists spent 173.9 million LVL, which is 14% more than in the same period of the previous year. The tourists usually prefer to come here on vacation, business trip or visit their friends and relatives. The growth trend is continuing and the results for the entire year will be as good as for the first six months. As a destination of tourism, Latvia has taken a giant step forward and offers much interest for the tourists.
