Westjet in Canada seems to be just as well loved as Southwest Airlines is in the US. The airline recently announced plans to launch a regional airline to serve secondary and tertiary Canadian cities with non-stop service using new regional aircraft. Since then, there has been a flurry of smaller Canadian airports trying to woo the airline and start service to their cities.

Bringing Westjet to Penticton
One of the most innovative of those efforts has come from Penticton Airport in British Columbia, which has a bunch of kids at the airport dancing to “Send me on my Way” from Rusted Root to woo West Jet into considering adding Penticton to their expanding regional network.

In addition to the Youtube video, they’ve creatively  added a Facebook page entitled, ‘Bring WestJet to Penticton‘  and followed up with a Twitter hashtag too, #westjetpenticton, to demonstrate all the local support there is for the service. And the city Mayor is involved in the efforts too!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSpLNflxhkg[/youtube]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/AndrewJakubeit/status/181862342185861120"]
Certainly something to make WestJet route planners to sit up and take …

Some of you already know that we have an active YouTube channel - we call it SimpliFlyingTV - where we regularly post interesting airline-branding and AvGeek videos, often including exclusive interviews with airline executives. A week or so ago, we hit the magical 1,000,000 (we just couldn’t resist putting those zeros there!) views mark – hence, we’ve decided to celebrate this milestone by offering our readers a selection of the very best videos from our channel.

 
Inside the Boeing 787 Dreamliner cabin
The launch of the 787 Dreamliner has been one of the most exciting aviation landmarks of the past few years and our readers will remember that our CEO Shashank Nigam and Senior Innovation Officer Shubhodeep Pal were recently able to fly on one of these aircraft at the Singapore Air Show. Long before that however, back in 2009, Shashank was able to obtain an exclusive interview with Boeing’s Colleen Rainbolt and tour the inside of a 787.

The video below was published back in 2009 and has been viewed over 670,000 times.

 
Bombardier CSeries Cabin Tour
Staying with the “cabin” theme, the second video we’ve selected for you is an exclusive visit to another innovative aircraft, the keenly anticipated Bombardier C-series.

 
Air New …

Social technologies are gaining huge traction among airlines. There’s simply no denying it. A couple of months ago, we released an infographic that showed how airlines are dedicating resources to social media. Most major airlines, according to the infographic, already have social media teams in place – most are managing cross-departmental strategies. Some even have plans to expand their teams later this year. That infographic was deemed to be a truly important one as far as the topic of airlines in social media was concerned: it received over 100,000 views and was featured in a number of publications including twice on Mashable itself!
Make sense of the chaos
Now, to add to all the hullaballoo, it really doesn’t help that social technologies are not just adding newer features regularly, but new social technologies themselves are being launched a dime a dozen (any takers for Google+ in airlines?).

So if you’re an airline marketer and thinking really hard about which social technologies to adopt apart from the usual suspects, we have the perfect remedy for your troubles. In fact, even if you’ve figured out which social platforms to adopt, you might still be wondering how best to use them or …

At SimpliFlying, we are big fans of Air New Zealand. It’s an underdog airline brand, which very often punches above its weight. Previously, we’ve featured an interview with the airline’s CEO, Rob Fyfe talking about Rico, featured their viral safety videos and earlier this month, honored the lady behind the latest safety video, Megan Matthews, as a SimpliFlying Hero.

And now, the airline itself has come up with a video about their social media strategy, and the secret sauce that makes it so successful! So, we had to bring that video to you too!

Before you dive in, it will be interesting to note that:

They broke almost all rules of traditional branding in getting Air New Zealand to where it is
Their brand mascot, Rico, is the exact opposite of what you’d expect from other brand icons, like the Singapore Girl – it polarizes the audience!
Their safety videos are anything but mundane
They’ve been featured in the New York Times and other leading outlets, not by advertising in them, but because their marketing efforts were worthy of the coverage
And they’ve done this at a fraction of the marketing budget you’d expect an …

At a conference in Acapulco, Mexico this week, after my speech, a journalist asked me – how can airlines create viral videos? And my answer to that was… you can’t “create a viral video”. You can create a video and hope that it goes viral, meaning it gets watched by a lot of people and gets shared by lots too, generally in a short period of time. It’s an art, more than a science.

But it seems that the smart folks at Air New Zealand are bent on proving me wrong!
Fun safety videos as a marketing strategy?
1.2 million views in 40 hours. That’s what Air New Zealand’s latest safety video “Fit To Fly” has achieved.  It is high energy, 80s retro, Lycra clad fun hosted by that era’s exercise guru Richard Simmons, who is having a renaissance, and featured on Ellen recently. The video also features a few high profile cameos, including one from Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan. But the key point to note is that this is not the first of Air New Zealand’s safety videos that’s gone crazy-viral!

The Bare Essentials safety video, with crew (and CEO) in just body paint, has over 6 million views …

Any branding initiative that doesn’t bring in a return-on-effort is not worth doing. Because then it becomes a hindrance. “Oh, I need to upload the photos onto the Facebook album” shouldn’t end up in deferment of important business-driving efforts. But then again, if uploading photos on Facebook is linked to the business objectives itself, then it’s a different conversation altogether.

At the Online Marketing for Travel Summit in Miami, I am shared my ideas on how travel firms (not just airlines) can drive conversion in online and social marketing. These are the slides from that presentation, with three specific ideas.

Converting Youtube lookers to bookers, using the Annotation tool in YouTube videos
Driving conversion by adding third party reviews in the booking engine
Using Flip.to for driving loyalty by getting people to share their travel plans

Enjoy the presentation! I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts on this, and how you drive conversion in your organization. Let’s discuss in the comments section, and on Twitter (@simpliflying)…

We all know United Airlines broke Dave Carroll’s guitar, and got caught stunned like a rabbit in headlights, when the video became a hit. But worry not, SimpliFlying has The Answer to United’s troubles. This song provides United Airlines with 10 solutions to dealing with this “PR mess” in a fun, innovative way. And in turn, engaging its passengers too.

For the vocally inclined, lyrics are included in the video. Enjoy the song, and the video. To have even more fun, try counting the number of unique planes seen in the video, and state your answer in the comments. The backstory follows.

The Backstory
When Dave Carroll came out with his first United Breaks Guitars video, I wrote an article that explained why Dave has become the de-facto Chief Marketing Officer of United Airlines.  The article was a huge hit, even getting a mention from the revered Chris Brogan.

After the first song, there was a huge hue and cry in the media about the PR disaster United faced. So when Dave came up with his …