Open Doors by Air Asia

Open Doors by Air Asia

This January, to celebrate its 16th anniversary, Air Asia treated fans in its home domestic market of Malaysia to a treasure hunt.

In Air Asia’s ‘Open Doors’ promotion, Malaysians were asked to find one of 16 ‘hidden doors’ around the country. Once found, they had to snap a picture of themselves in front of the door and upload it onto Instagram using the hashtag #airasiaopendoors.

The doors themselves were not Air Asia branded, but had traditional Malay or Chinese patterns on them. Clues on Air Asia’s social media channels directed fans to find the doors.

According to Air Asia, the thinking behind the campaign was to follow “the AirAsia story in opening doors for over a decade to allow travellers to discover many unexplored destinations in the region and beyond to gather enriching experiences beyond the usual attractions.”

In total a respectable 3300 photos were uploaded onto Instagram using the hashtag. 186 winners were then given points and entered into a draw to win two million ‘BIG’ points.

The contest also generated extensive coverage in the local Malaysian press, including The Star, and Malay Mail.

A number of other airlines have used ‘treasure hunts’ as a marketing mechanic. For example, British regional airline bmi regularly stages ‘Golden Ticket’ promotions in its destinations.

In the ‘Golden Ticket’ promo, 25 pairs of tickets are hidden around a city on a given day and released in hourly batches. Clues are broadcast on the bmi website and on social media channels about the location of the tickets. Fans then have to go and find the tickets and hand them into a bmi representative in exchange for a flight voucher.

Recent Golden Ticket promotions have taken place in Nuremberg (Germany), Lublin (Poland) and Norrkoping (Sweden).

Normally bmi’s ‘Golden Ticket’ promotion is done in conjunction with the local airport and a media partner (e.g. the local radio station).

Last year Qatar Airways ran a virtual ‘golden ticket’ campaign, which gave travellers the chance to fly to destinations including Cape Town, The Seychelles, Dubai (at a time when the airline was still able to fly there) and more for free.

For clues on where to find the golden ticket on the website, fans had to watch a series of videos (specific to the country in which they were based), for example UK fans had a UK specific video and North American fans had one aimed at them.

Key Take-Away

Treasure hunts can be effective as fans tend to like the quiz / competition element. As the three airlines we’ve profiled show, they can work in a number of different ways.

You can run them over a month and hide a number of items around a larger area (which is what Air Asia did in Malaysia), you can run the treasure hunt over one day in one location and get fans to race from place to place to find the tickets (which is what bmi does), or you can run a virtual treasure hunt where people have to look for clues on your website (like Qatar Airways).

The key for success in each case seems to be that the prize needs to be big enough (free flights normally works) and the mechanic has to be challenging but not so difficult that it puts people off.