Qantas - Qantas Safety Video

Qantas - Qantas Safety Video

In 2016, Qantas rolled out its first campaign with national tourism body Tourism Australia since 2012 by launching a new in-flight safety video showcasing a range of Australian destinations.

The video didn’t feature images of the aircraft, instead “ordinary” Australians took passengers on a tour of their home country, providing safety briefings in different iconic locations (for example, the lifejacket demonstration happened at Bondi Icebergs).

The 2017 safety video builds on last year’s film by having a similar style and theme. Regular members of the public show off different places in Australia while providing the all important safety information.

As a result, by featuring everyone from a troop of indigenous dancers in New South Wales to a window washer at the towering Q1 skyscraper at Queensland’s Surfers Paradise beach the spot doubles as a sensational down under tourism spot as well as a safety video.

Shot over 12 days in 15 breathtakingly beautiful locales across the country, including Sydney Harbour, the ski slopes of Victoria’s Mt. Hotham, a beach teaming with kangaroos in Cape Hillsborough, and the runaway of a fashion show in Melbourne, the clip was so epic in scope that it even had a world-class Hollywood premiere at the Loew’s Hotel in Lost Angeles.

At the Hollywood launch of the video, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce explained that the goal was to ”make the safety video engaging as well as informative. We know the combination of beautiful landscapes and laidback Aussie charm really cuts through. It’s also why this video doubles as a perfect tourism ad.”

Sixty versions of the video have been produced to accommodate eleven different languages and the different types of aircraft across the Qantas fleet.

Last year’s video was viewed a whopping 90 million times across social media and Qantas is hoping for a similar success this year. At time of writing, the video has received extensive coverage in travel and marketing media such as Traveller.com. au, news.com and the Australian media and marketing hotspot Mumbrella.

Another airline which used its home country in a safety video was Lebanese airline MEA. The video, which we featured last year, shows cabin crew and a dance troupe around landmarks such as the ruins of Baalbek and the Pigeon Rocks in Beirut.

Key Take-Away

Australia is incredibly photogenic and it regularly appears on top destination of the year lists from publishers such as Lonely Planet. Tourism Australia also has the distinction of hosting the largest (in terms of followers) destination social media channels in the world.

As a result, the video serves several purposes. It gets passengers’ attention by visually and mentally taking them outside the aircraft environment. It ties the Qantas brand into the warm big-hearted spirit of the Aussies featured on the film. And if leaving the country, it provides a prompt for passengers to travel with the airline again, by making them think about another holiday to Australia.