Jet2-The Ultimate School Trip

JET2 - THE ULTIMATE SCHOOL TRIP

According to UK leisure airline Jet2, “School trips help to create some of our best school memories. Inspirational locations, learning outside the classroom and the joy of travelling with your best mates all make school trips magical.” This insight led the airline to launch it’s “Ultimate School Trip” campaign, last November, where the actual trip having took place at the end of April 2018.

Fronted by UK kids’ TV presenters “Dick & Dom”, the Ultimate School Trip campaign gave classes of kids aged 9-13 the chance to win a trip to the Sol Katmandu Park & Resort in Majorca to take part in “fun educational workshops.” To enter, kids had to “jet-power their imagination” and produce their own promotional piece for Sol Katmandu Park & Resort, whether that be a poster, poem, song or video.

Despite the barrier to entry being reasonably high (i.e. this is much more than a case of “like to win”), the campaign received an excellent response. 1600 schools ended up submitting entries, with Jet2 putting 45 entries up for a public vote in March.

Indeed, a look through YouTube shows that a lot of kids and schools went through a fair amount of effort to try and win the prize, with some really creative entries being submitted. For example, Valley Gardens Middle School in Whitley Bay did a spoof news broadcast, Wheatfield Primary School went filmed a song and dance routine, while Ormiston SWB Academy in the West Midlands pretended to do a virtual reality tour of the Katmandu Resort in a geography lesson.

Meanwhile, one of the eventual winners, Canal View Primary School in Edinburgh, Scotland, produced a kind of play featuring a lego set and lego characters.

In the end, nine schools won the prize, each one linked to one of Jet2’s UK airports (Edinburgh, Leeds Bradford, East Midlands, London Stansted etc).

They were then flown to Majorca for a long weekend over 20-22 April, featuring a welcome party, a school disco and interactive Science, History, Drama and Crafts workshops hosted by “Dick & Dom.”

Every stage of the campaign was hosted on Jet2’s social media channels (in particular YouTube and Facebook), as well as via a micro-site. The campaign videos on Facebook in particular seem to have notched up over 100k views, with excellent engagement.

KEY TAKE-AWAY

We’ve chosen ‘The Ultimate School Trip’ as our campaign of the month for a number of reasons:

1 - Targeting. The targeting here is spot on. Jet2 flies mainly from UK regional airports (and also London Stansted) to destinations in the Mediterranean, as well as some city break destinations such as Prague and ski destinations in the Winter.

2 - Exposure. One of the campaign videos mentions that 1600 entries were whittled down to nine winners. For 1600 school classes to take part is hugely impressive.

Assuming a class size of 30, that means close to 50k kids will have participated. And those kids will have gone home and talked to their parents / sibling about it, making Jet2 a topic of dinner time conversation in homes around the UK.

Why did so many schools take part? Our assumption is that a lot of teachers will sometimes struggle to come up with a fun and interactive class project Jet2 provided a ready made solution with an amazing prize as an incentive.

3 - Longevity. The campaign kicked off in November and the winners’ flew to Spain in March. That’s six months worth of exposure and content. That content was, bearing in mind it was largely produced by ten year old kids and their teachers, of an extremely high quality.

4 - Celebrity involvement. Dick & Dom are well known figures on UK kids’ TV, and other celebrities were brought in as well for the actual trip.

Getting schools to become involved in a commercial initiative can be tricky, but Jet2 has shown how it can be done.