Various - April Fool's Day Compilation

Various - April Fool's Day Compilation

Christmas-themed airline spots have become holiday staples over the years - and the bigger, the better.

But these days, a new holiday has emerged as a major marketing force to be reckoned with and the results are often off-the-charts hilarious. We are talking of course, about April Fool’s Day.

This year, the pranks reached new heights with airlines outdoing themselves in the spoof stories they pushed out on the day. Some of the highlights are as follows:

Southwest kicked things off in high style with a cheeky clip highlighting their new Bucklr dating app which supposedly pairs single travellers up inflight. The film showed a young woman walking into an aircraft and swiping up or down much like with Tinder on viewing other passengers.

That particular idea isn’t of course that far removed from reality, with KLM already offering a ‘Meet and Seat’ facility via Facebook (though not a dating feature, in theory it could of course be one!)

Emirates is the largest operator of A380 aircraft worldwide and so it’s no surprise that its April Fool’s joke revolved around aircraft size, in particular the debut of the world’s first triple decker aircraft.

The new APR001 (get it?), features a swimming pool, games room and an actual park on one of its flight decks.

Qatar Airways meanwhile posted a pic on Facebook touting their new YouSuite which is a solitary chair in a spacious, tastefully-appointed aircraft cabin.

Low cost carrier Scoot created a hilariously retro, informercial-style spot for something they called the Velcro Suit 2000, which would not only make remembering to pack all those extra carry-ons a breeze but also featured a link touting Scoot’s real-life extra 7kg cabin bag promotion.

Not to be outdone, Russian carrier S7 posted a pic on Facebook of their new astronaut-inspired Borscht in a tube. This again ties into a campaign the airline has done before, last year Cosmonaut Andrei Borisenko fronted S7’s “Best of Planets.”

Air Baltic took the first two letters of their newest destinations - “Ma” for Madrid, “Ge” for Geneva, “Go” for Gothenburg, and “Od” for Odessa - to create an entirely fictional place they called Magegood.

However the airline also offered passengers a 15% discount on future flights when using the e-voucher code: Magegood.

UK regional carrier Flybe announced that their new Welfare Of Our Passengers Officer would be a very cute dog and as usual, Ryanair went against the grain by promoting services that they actually offer -- like cheap package holidays, two carry-on bags and fares as low as €9.99.

But when it comes to airline April Fool’s pranks, it’s hard to top old pros like WestJet and Virgin Atlantic.

WestJet pushed out a very funny spot touting a name change to Canada Air using the hashtag and discount promo code #MostCanadian airline , and Virgin

Atlantic CEO Sir Richard Branson himself appeared in a spot promoting the airline’s new “flapenergy”-fueled aircraft, the Dreambird 1417 which flies by flapping its metal wings like a bird.

Key Take-Away

While April Fools’ Day is an opportunity, it’s also a challenge - practically everyone is at it, and you can’t always cut through the noise. As Mashable explained last year, this makes it tough to get right especially as “humour is not right for every brand.”

However by and large the airlines succeeded for two reasons. First of all the things they did were in-line with previous brand efforts.

So, S7 had a space theme, which links into a previous campaign. Virgin Atlantic used Sir Richard Branson fronting the kind of video you could imagine him doing anyway.

Meanwhile in the case of Air Baltic, the joke tied into actual destination launches and gave fans a real incentive (a money off voucher) to be in on the joke.