Piret Mürk-Dubout joins Managing and Supervisory Boards of the ETRC
Piret Mürk-Dubout, VP, Maritime Affairs, ERTC and member of ERTC Management and Supervisory Boards
The European Travel Retail Confederation (ETRC) has nominated Piret Mürk-Dubout, Member of the Management Board of Tallink Grupp, to join their Managing Board. She has also been appointed to the Supervisory Board of ETRC in her role as alternate member of the Nordic Travel Retail Group (NTRG).
"In this capacity, Mürk-Dubout becomes Vice President in charge of Maritime Affairs for the organization, using her contribution and experience in the sector to support future action plans of the confederation with stronger focus on the cruise and ferry industry retail plans and development. She additionally brings to the boards a strong background in customer experience, retail operations and partnerships, adapting to change, as well as a passion for sustainability, innovation, partnership building and future trends."
ETRC President Nigel Keal said, “I am delighted that Piret has accepted to join the Managing Board of ETRC as Vice-President Maritime Affairs. ETRC will greatly benefit from her unique expertise in the maritime sector and maritime airport retail as well as her background in airport management. Ferry and cruise retail are very important channels for European Travel Retail and I am glad that this is now fully represented at ETRC Board level thanks to Piret’s presence.”
Mürk-Dubout is a member of the Management Board of shipping company Tallink Grupp and in her role has responsibility in the business for the areas of international sales, marketing and customer services in Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Latvia and Germany; travel retail, Tallink Duty Free and e-commerce; the development of on-board services, food & beverage concept development, entertainment development and group sustainability.
“I’m honored and humbled to take this role to represent the maritime industry and the cruise and ferry businesses in this prestigious confederation," said Mürk-Dubout. "We must continue to work hard to adapt to the transformation and changes caused by the COVID pandemic to reach the revenue and passenger number levels we were used to pre-pandemic. We are taking many steps to modernize and improve customer service and experiences by developing different travel retail services, including digitizing and personalizing customers’ choices and experiences. We want to work even more closely with our partners and new consumers with the aim of maintaining the travel retail sector’s uniqueness of assortment and to ensure that the travel retail offering in itself is something special, bringing customers on board. There are many challenges ahead of us, arising from the pressing and urgent timescales of the green transformation and the goal to continuously reduce our footprint and negative environmental impact working with our partners across our value chains.”
Prior to joining Tallink Grupp, Mürk-Dubout was the CEO of Tallinn Airport. She has worked in many leading positions both in Estonia and Sweden, such as the VP, Director of the Business Development area for Telia Group in Stockholm, having responsibility for strategic business development in Scandinavia, Eurasia, and Europe. She has also worked as a Management Board member of Telia Estonia and prior to this as the member of Management Board at EMT, the Communications Director at Elion Enterprises and as the Strategy Lead at Eesti Telekom. She has also previously held the positions of the public relations department manager at the Estonian Ministry of Internal Affairs, and as a member of the editorial team at Estonian National Broadcasting current affairs and news team, as a CNN news correspondent among other journalistic roles.
