Daybreak - Shopping at an Indian airport? Almost everything you touch could belong to Adani

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

When Dreamfolks Services entered India’s aviation scene, it quietly built the plumbing that made airport lounge access possible. It linked banks, card networks, and travellers to hundreds of lounges nationwide. For years, it stayed out of sight, powering a privilege most flyers never thought twice about.Now, it’s being shown the door.Adani, India’s biggest airport operator, is moving fast to take full control — not just of the runways, but everything that happens beyond security. Lounges, food courts, duty-free zones, and retail stores are all coming under its fold. Some are being rebranded, others replaced — and nearly all are being pulled into Adani’s growing airport ecosystem.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

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Every time you've used your credit card to get access to an airport lounge, chances are that it was Liberata Khaled's company that made it happen. A few weeks ago, Khaled, the founder of Dreamfolk's services, went on national television and sounded a warning that cut through all the corporate PR noise. So, for context, DreamFolk's service. Fox does not own airport lounges. But what it does is basically act like the middleman who is connecting banks, card networks, lounge operators and travelers. And the company, which is public, by the way, has been running the show for years and has quietly built a 90% monopoly

in the space. Now, Khalat has essentially accused India's two largest airport operators, Adani and GMR, of using their position to quietly force banks to stop working with her company. She said, that the message to these banks from the two companies was simple. Sign with us directly or lose access to the airport. Now, you might think this is usual corporate competition in a fast growing market. But there is more to it. If you look closely, it is actually a very strategic dismantling of this whole ecosystem that allowed independent aggregators, retailers and hospitality brands to thrive inside Indian airports. And Dreamforks made that happen. business was invisible, but it was essential. And now this whole model is being erased.

Over the last two years, Adani has moved decisively to bring everything inside its airports under its own control or under the control of its aligned partners. Loungees, food, duty-free, even convenience stores. Middellman are being removed and brands are being replaced. Independent operators are essentially losing ground inside these airports. And what is important, merging is not just a new model for airport management, but a new kind of monopoly. So, how does a company like Adani transform one of India's most public, most regulated spaces into something that is so private and centralized? And what happens to everybody who is left on the outside?

Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nick Das Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rahal Philippos and I will come to you with one business story, That is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 29th of July. You see, all of this did not happen overnight. According to DreamFox founder Liberata Kalat, the signs were there two years ago.

Quiet feelers, vague hints from partners that maybe the old lounge access model where third-party aggregators like DreamFox sat in the middle were not going to last. But last October, things started getting real. lounge operators were directly told the aggregator model was on its way out and soon after two big names which is travel food services or tFS and encamp hospitality cut ties with dream folks they signed directly with adani and then the banks began to follow ICICI access and others were reportedly being nudged quite hard to drop the aggregators and work directly with the airports or with the lords or with the lidsaycic. lounge operators themselves. DreamFox was not just being pushed aside, they were kind of being locked out. See, if a credit card wants to offer free lounge access today, it doesn't have to go

through DreamFox anymore. It can go straight to the source. And for DreamFox, that is obviously a serious problem. Loungeers still account for 93% of the company's revenue, which was £1,200 crore rupees out of $1,300 crore in the financial year 2025. Now, this is not just a loss of market share, it is also an existential threat. And lounges are just the beginning. Over the past year, across multiple airports, businesses are seeing the same pattern repeat. Basically, if you're not owned by the airport operator or closely tied to them, you're going to get pushed out. Coffee kiosk, duty-free stores, retail counters, even pop-ups. The message is quite clear. Why rent to outsiders when you can run it all yourself? More on how exactly this is happening

in the next segment, stay tuned. Let us look at Mumbai Airport. Unlike some of Adani's other airports where third-party concessionaires still manage the commercial areas, Mumbai is a little different. Here, Adani controls the non-aeronautical side of the business directly

and the transformation has been massive. The old setup was quite simple. A brand like a burger chain, for example, would pay rent or share of revenue to operate inside the terminal. But now, the model has to be. has been flipped. Adani has moved to a franchisee system. Brands are no longer running their own stores. They are licensing their names to the airport and Adani runs the operation. And economics,

let me explain. So say a store makes 50 lakh rupees in monthly sales, the brand takes home just 3 to 5% of it, which is 1.5 to 2.5 lakhs. The rest stays with the airport. And that shift has shaken up the food and beverage scene. TFS, which was once an independent player, is now aligned with Adani. Last year, Adani acquired a majority stake in Semolina Kitchens, which is a TFS subsidiary. Now, as a result, TFS is becoming the dominant F&B operator at Mumbai Airport. Lightbite foods, which used to hold half of the food business there, has seen its share drop below 20%. Deviani International is also on its way out.

Both are expected to fully exit once their contracts end this year. And it does not stop at food. Loungees, like I mentioned earlier, are being consolidated too. Of the eight lounges at Mumbai airport, at least five are now managed by TFS. Through Semolina, TFS also holds lounge and quick service restaurant rides at six of Adani's airports and at GMR-run Goa Airport as well. So the roles are shrinking and the partners are becoming fewer. Dreamforks used to be the glue which was linking banks, card networks and lounge operators,

and it was their tech that made it all work so smoothly. Banks only had to integrate with one system. Now, every airport and lounge operator is building their own backend. Now, that may sound efficient, but in reality, it is making life very hard for banks and for card users. They are dealing with fragmented systems. The simplicity that Dreamforks was offering is now going. Kalat still says that she is open to partnerships and she believes that a strategic deal with Dreamfolks could have worked

and she's quite clear what the operators are doing is not illegal but it is not a level playing field either in other words it is not a free market anymore daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform what you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber on the office.

A full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcast extras. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted by Snittha Sharma and edited by Rajiv Siyah.