Air Transat-Vacation is Calling

AIR TRANSAT - VACATION IS CALLING

What does going on vacation / holiday involve? Yes, it means going somewhere different to your everyday life where you can unwind, explore or discover.

But iti s also a sensory experience, you see, hear, feel, smell and touch new things. This is a concept Russian airline S7 captured brilliantly in its ‘Best of Planets’ campaign, with an ad touching on the different senses narrated by Cosmonaut Andrey Borisenko.

A campaign developed by Canadian advertising agency Sid Lee for airline Air Transat takes a very similar approach. Initially launched in 2016, the second iteration of the ‘Vacation is Calling” campaign launched last month (September).

Vacation is Calling seeks to merge the world’s of ‘imagination and reality’. The original campaign involved people’s every day lives being merged with vacation experiences. For example, a woman lying on a bed finds herself lying the ocean, while a manin a truck gets out to find a sailboat on the road.

The new 2017 ads now include the airline’s flight attendants. For example, “People become fish” sees a flight attendant encouraging a passenger to swim beyond the caves in an unnamed destination, at which point we see her doing so.

The idea is to showcase the cabin crew’s tips and favorite places indifferent sun destinations, or as Air Transat vice president GenevièveLeBrun put it, “This passion for travel and tourism is part of Transat employees’ DNA, and finds expression every day in a multitude of ways—and that’s why we wanted to highlight it in the campaign.” In addition to TV and online video advertising, the campaign is coming to life through billboards and out of home ads and via a social media campaign.

In the UK, these ‘cabin crew’ tips were featured in one of the country’s biggest tabloid newspapers, the Daily Mirror, which published them in a guide on Canada’s major cities.

Using cabin crew to provide travel tips is a fairly common airline marketing mechanic.

To take just one example, Emirates has done everything from use its crew to talk about how to look good on long-haul flights, to doing a ‘through the lens’ project where staff took over the airline’s Instagram account.

KEY TAKE-AWAY

Air Transat is trying to do two very different things here. On one hand, it is trying to mentally transport people to a vacation destination and get them to imagine the sights and sounds they’ll see when they get there.

On the other hand, it has now woven ‘cabin crew tips’ into campaign. You could argue that these two elements should be kept separate and that the campaign was more impactful last year when it only tried to do one of those things.