Virgin Atlantic - Pitch to Rich

Virgin Atlantic - Pitch to Rich

Virgin Atlantic’s new London Heathrow to Tel Aviv route started at the end of September. To promote the launch, the airline announced a ‘Pitch to Rich’ competition.

The idea combined a few things: A Dragon’s Den style pitch by entrepreneurs in front of Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson, a nod to the fact that Tel Aviv and Israel in general is home to a thriving tech start-up community, and of course an opportunity to promote the new route to Israeli business and leisure travellers.

Business owners had to be up and running for two years with a turnover of at least $150,000 a year to qualify. The first stage involved submitting a short two minute video about how the business hopes to get to the next level.

The second stage was then an event in Tel Aviv in front of a judging panel chaired by Sir Richard Branson.

Of course, that wasn’t the only element to Virgin Atlantic’s launch campaign. It also involved:

Jewish Cultural Experience Days for Crew

On its blog, Virgin Atlantic says that it put its crew through two Jewish cultural experience days in London for the onboard managers operating the route.

The workshops involved discussion of Jewish customs, religious laws and festivals, as well as an in-depth look at kosher food.

The workshops provided crew with knowledge to share with other crew members, and helped them understand some of the specific requests they might receive onboard.

Crew members also visited a kosher supermarket, a synagogue and the Jewish Learning Exchange in Golders Green, a north London neighbourhood that’s home to a large Orthodox Jewish community.

Given that many of the seats on the flights will be sold both to Israeli Jews, as well as to members of the UK’s 300,000 strong Jewish community this move, and promoting that it was happening, of course made perfect sense.

In fact, the God Save the Points review of the launch flight mentions that the flight service manager had gone through the trouble of learning Hebrew for six months before the launch flight, that there was kosher wine and champagne on offer, and that dishes from Israel-themed London restaurant, ‘The Good Egg’ were on offer.

Virgin Atlantic - NFL Games

At the same time, Virgin Atlantic announced its sponsorship of the NFL Games, an annual event in London where US teams come and play in front of UK fans.

To mark the sponsorship, Virgin Atlantic released a video and ran a competition where the prize was tickets to Orlando to see the NFL All Stars Game in 2020.