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London City Airport-Smartphone Amnesty
LONDON CITY AIRPORT - SMARTPHONE AMNESTY
According to a Washington Post story almost two thirds of holiday makers plan to check their work emails while away, with only a third unplugging. This compares to 2014, when the proportion was 50/50.
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It’s something almost everyone can sympathise with. Unless you are in a really remote location with no mobile or internet access, you are never really away. That’s even the case in the air, with 80+ airlines now providing in-flight WiFi (see our Austrian Airlines story in this issue).
In response, London City Airport launched a ‘smartphone amnesty’ in association with NYC startup Light Phone.
Passengers flying from LCY from 13 to 27 August were given the chance to register for a Light Phone, a basic phone that allows you to store nine numbers and make calls - but that’s it. No mobile web browsing, checking social media, reading emails, getting ping notifications etc.
Each phone came with a pay as you go sim-card from UK phone network EE.
Passengers additionally had to sign “Memorandum of Understanding”, committing them to at least 48 hours of Light Phone use, while their smartphone remained switched off.
As a bonus, passengers could even get to keep the pretty attractive looking handsets at the end of their holiday (LCY’s press release does make clear supplies are limited).
Light Phone’s partnership with LCY comes as the company is about to launch a new version of their phone, which this time offer a few more features such as messaging and an alarm clock. Light Phone raised almost US $ 2 million on Indiegogo, for this ‘Light Phone 2.’
This is a smart and creative campaign that not surprisingly got London City Airport a fair amount of media pick-up such as in the Evening Standard (London), Gizmodo, and Tech Radar.
Though LCY has traditionally been known as a business traveller’s airport, there has been an increase in routes of interest to holiday makers such as ones to Ibiza, Nice, Faro, Skiathos and Mykonos (British Airways), and Lisbon and Porto (TAP Air Portugal).
