Innovative ad campaign for British Airways - must be a nightmare to produce

There's an interesting press release from British Airways kicking about today talking about it's new campaign to extol the virtues of Terminal 5 at London's Heathrow.

The campaign will capture images from travellers as they pass through the airport together with messages about how well certain elements of the airport are working, from the baggage handling to security to efficiency of flight arrivals.

I guess they feel confident enough to do it now. UPDATE: TimesOnline sticks the knife in.

The most interesting aspect of the campaign is that the artwork for the ads will apparently be produced on the morning of publication/broadcast and therefore adding a real-time element to the proceedings.

Sounds like a tricky prospect from a logistics point of view, but BA is known for being slightly more creative than some of the other airlines.

Below is one of the first ones, which start today. It is for the outdoor part of the campaign and will form the basis of the online creative as well.

BBH is the ad agency behind the campaign, with Agency.com following up with online.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

How headlines work - T5 still losing lots of bags

One could surmise from these two examples of creative headline writing (which stand out a mile in RSS feeds) that the Telegraph has a bigger axe to grind than the Guardian over the T5 situation.

From the Guardian's travel section today...


And the Telegraph...


The actual figure is 932.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Jargon abusers named and shamed

The Plain English Campaign likes to kick the boot into companies who mask the simple use of language with corporate-speak or gobbledygook.

This year's winners from the travel industry include:

Virgin Trains for a letter about problems booking online - "Moving forwards, we as Virgin Trains are looking to take ownership of the flow in question to apply our pricing structure, thus resulting in this journey search appearing in the new category-matrix format. The pricing of this particular flow is an issue going back to 1996 and it is not something that we can change until 2008 at the earliest. I hope this makes the situation clear." Erm, yes, absolutely.

BAA for a sign at Gatwick Airport - "Passenger shoe repatriation area only." This is obviously somewhere different from the Customer Pause Zone just before immigration. Travel Weekly's chief sub Megan Turner was moved recently to take a picture.

Translink for a sign at Coleraine railway station - "Every Autumn a combination of leaves on the line, atmospheric conditions and prevailing damp conditions lead to a low adhesion between the rail head and the wheel which causes services to be delayed or even cancelled. NI Railways are committed to minimising service delays, where we can, by implementing a comprehensive low adhesion action programme." Or, getting rid of the leaves.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

Technorati tags: jargon buster gobbledygook

Australia searches illustrate buoyancy in travel

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise UK writes:

In one of the busiest months for holiday makers, the travel industry was hit hard by an averted terrorist plot, stories and images of queues at the major airports, and now threats of a strike at Stansted this coming bank holiday weekend. [Since cancelled - Ed]

We prepared a brief analysis of the impact of these events on consumer behaviour online to help our customers understand the impact on the industry and to benchmark the impact on their own.

Overall our analysis reveals that fewer visits are going to travel websites, with the exception of websites for airlines, which consumers are likely contacting for updated travel information. The analysis also reveals that long-term travel plans, such as plans to visit Australia for the Ashes Tour, do not appear to be impacted.

Last week I posted on the immediate aftermath and so will focus today on the results in the week after the attacks.

The following chart illustrates the share of all UK internet searches for the ten most searched-for destinations (measured as searches that include the keywords "flights to") in the past four weeks.

Whilst searches for many popular destinations declined last week, searches for "flights to australia", "flights to tenerife", and "flights to turkey" all increased. Searches for "flights to Australia" were no doubt buoyed by the cricket matches over the weekend and anticipation of the Ashes tour.

New York was hard hit, with searches for "flights to new york" moving from position 5 among the most searched-for flight destinations to position 10. Searches for "flights to new york" also experienced the largest week-on-week decline in share of searches, down 56% week-on-week and 4% year-on-year.

Visits to travel websites declined last week but it is important for travel companies to be able to benchmark their own decline against the industry to understand if they are fairing better or worse - or the same - as competitors.

The following figures provide the percentage change in market share of visits to travel category websites comparing the week ending 5th August 2006 with the week ending 19th August 2006.

Since visits increased to travel websites in the immediate aftermath of the security alert, the comparison is done to the week before to provide a more accurate measure of change.

Travel – agencies: -17%

Travel – destinations & accommodation: -10%

Travel – transport: +9%

Aviation – commercial airlines: +19%

The top 10 sites in the travel agencies and destinations & accommodation categories all experienced a decline in market share last week compared with two weeks prior. Transport site visits varied, with some experiencing growth and others declines.

Thomson Fly, BMI Baby and Flybe all saw their market share of visits decline over the past two weeks, by 10%, 5% and 14% respectively.

British Airways, RyanAir and BAA all saw the highest percentage growth among the top ten, at 17%, 13%, and 203% respectively.

The top 10 sites in each of the travel categories for the most part remained unchanged last week. The only notable exception was that British Airways took the #2 ranking among commercial airlines, overtaking RyanAir by a margin of less than 1% market share of visits.

Heather Hopkins, vice president for research at Hitwise UK

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