benchmark report
airline marketing
social
pop-up restaurant above the clouds
#happytohelp KLM
SWISS
One of the trends highlighted in our 2014 State of Airline Marketing report are socalled ‘micro events’. Ranging from mid-air fashion shows to inflight bingo and product giveaways, a growing number of airlines are organizing onboard events in order to turn an otherwise unremarkable flight into something passengers will tell the social circle online and offline. An interesting concept has been announced by SWISS, which will be turning flight LX 16 from Zurich to New York on 21 November into a “pop-up restaurant above the clouds.” Chef Andreas Caminada, of Switzerland’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant Schloss Schauenstein (which is ranked #43 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list) - along with his entire kitchen brigade – will be cooking
NOVEMBER 2014 ISSUE
for “all passengers,” from First Class to Economy. Camina will also personally serve his creations – accompanied by wines that he has personally selected – with the support of SWISS’s cabin crew team. “In addition to our ‘SWISS Taste of Switzerland’ inflight foodservice concept, we want to offer our guests a further and unique culinary highlight on this particular flight,” says Frank Maier, SWISS’s Head of Product & Services. “And we are delighted that, in collaboration with Andreas Caminada, we will be the first airline in the world to take the innovative ‘pop-up restaurant’ concept and offer it above the clouds. Further details of the themed flight are available at the event’s microsite . SWISS is also holding a special draw for the event, with a pair of Business Class tickets and four pairs of Economy tickets to win.
KLM, known for its savvy social mediabased customer service (and innovative marketing campaigns), took both to new levels with a bold #HappyToHelp . Star ting with the premise that the best promotion for customer service is great customer service, a dedicated team scanned social media during five days for passengers facing travel woes throughout the world, and responded with a creative and relevant #HappytoHelp answer in real-time – even when those passengers were not travelling with KLM. Selected problems would then be solved in a variety of ways, ranging from actual physical intervention – such as helping someone retrieve a forgotten passpor t and still make their flight – to providing one-toone advice or information through social
media, which ranged from a simple text message to an Instagram picture, a Vine, or YouTube video. A custom-designed ‘real-time newsroom’ glass pavilion based at Amsterdam Schiphol Airpor t served as the central ‘control hub’ for the campaign and housed rotating 30-people teams from both the airline and its agency, working round-theclock in shifts. Meanwhile, KLM agents at Amsterdam Schiphol, São Paulo-Guarulhos, New York JFK and Hong Kong International also proactively approached travellers that seemed to have a problem. The airline had film crews on standby to shoot filmed responses to customers’ problems and record footage of the most interesting and unusual problems solved, which have been uploaded on YouTube. Examples here , here and here .
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EXPERIENTIAL SOCIAL DIGITAL TV, PRINT, OOH
