All You Can Jet Sweepstakes

Do you love your Instagram account? Do you love it enough to delete everything in it, in exchange for a year’s worth of free flights? If yes, then the competition jetBlue ran until March 8th will have been for you.

In the “All you can” competition, entrants were asked to delete their existing Instagram posts (or archive them), and add a single jetBlue image instead.

The idea was that with a blank slate, you could add new memories from all those flights you’d be taking over the coming year.

Needless to say, deleting all your photos didn’t mean you automatically won. jetBlue chose three winners among all the people who entered.

As a competition mechanic, it is certainly different - to the point of being bizzarre.

But judging from the comments on jetBlue’s Instagram post announcing the competition, plenty of people removed their selfies, holiday snaps, and pictures of their favourite food for a chance to win flights.

In fact, 14,000+ people used the competition hashtag.

Though that doesn’t mean 14,000 entered, it still means the tactic got an awful lot of pick-up on social media.

And on mainstream media as well, where the promotion got JetBlue acres of coverage. Just some examples are Techcrunch, The Verge, Fortune, CNET and London’s Evening Standard.

Most of the coverage focused on the rather unique nature of the competition and then asked pretty much the same question, why does JetBlue want you to commit to this act of social media cleansing?

As CNN’s AJ Willingham put it -

“The idea seems to pit two complementary forces against each other: The desire for unfettered world travel, and the desire to obsessively document it in all its filtered, color-saturated glory.”

In a statement given to Business Insider, JetBlue said:

"JetBlue’s All You Can Jet pass is the ultimate way for people to do more of the things they love as much as they’d like to.

“This year, we’re thrilled to bring back the coveted, unlimited travel pass with a twist: a social sweepstakes asking people to create a blank slate for the opportunity to live the jetsetter lifestyle, making memories and pursuing their passions in more than 100 JetBlue destinations for a full year!”

Many have pointed out that JetBlue asking people to delete their posts and replace it with a JetBlue branded image, isn’t a million miles away from the now infamous Fyre Festival, where guests were asked to change their profile pictures to an orange square.