Aer Lingus - Thru The Q

Aer Lingus - Thru The Q

AerLingus and ‘advocacy’ agency Testify invited a host of bloggers to take part in a travel writing competition to raise awareness in Great Britain of the airline’s USA pre-clearance facility at Dublin Airport, which allows passengers to arrive in the U.S. as a domestic travellers – cutting out long queus.

19 bloggers – who jointly had 80,000 Twitter followers and nearly 40,000 Facebook likes – took part and during 11 days had to drive their readers to an app on the Aer Lingus website where they had to sent their favorite blogger on a virtual journey from the UK to the USA via the airport with the fastest queuing time. Voters had 3 options: Dublin (fastest queuing time with pre-clearance), Heathrow and Gatwick (both longer queues – no pre-clearance) and could vote for their favourite blogger every day, ranking them on a leaderboard.

When a blogger received a vote to travel via a London airport this counted as a ‘negative vote’. Therefore it was in the interest of the blogger to carefully educate their audience as to the fact that Dublin is not only the correct answer, but WHY it is the correct answer. Voters had to Tweet their vote via the app to qualify as an entry.

The blogger with the most journeys via Dublin airport at the end of the campaign won a trip from the UK to New York, as well as one of his/her participating voters.

Overall 5,232 people participated in the competition and there were 582 ‘negative votes’. In total, there were 6,923 twitter mentions of the competition, which reached almost 1 million Twitter users.