Icelandair is letting its CEO and cabin crew host passengers in promotional push
Transatlantic airline Icelandair not only wants to fly people to Iceland but also act as a host once they get there, offering up its staff as tour guides in a new campaign.
The ‘Stopover Buddy’ campaign partners members of the airline's team including stewardesses and chief executive Birkir Hólm Guðnason with travellers in what is a free one-day-only service.
Each will share a different experience with passengers, with Guðnason taking them off-piste skiing, while Margret, a stewardess of 30 years, will introduce her guests to the local fishermen and give a cooking lesson in traditional Icelandic fish dishes.
Some 50 ‘buddies’ have been recruited for the push, which will run until the end of April in Icelandair’s key focus markets including United Kingdom, Scandinavia, Central Europe and North America.
The thinking behind the campaign is to get people to make the most of their time when they’re in Iceland, which is a popular stopover spot and as such doesn’t always mean travellers have the best memories of their time there.
Guðnason said the campaign would “remove” the stress of planning a stopover and show them a "truly unique experience”.
Agencies The Brooklyn Brothers and Islenska devised the campaign together, based on a brief to promote the Icelandic stopover experience with a cultural twist. Both creative shops will run all facets of the campaign side by side, including PR across 11 markets, overseeing asset creation and providing local market activations through content and social media. A new measurement system has also been crafted to track the promotion.
The agencies have worked with Icelandair toward the end of last year when they ran a promotion for a private partnership the airline is a part of along with the Icelandic government, City of Reykjavik, the Icelandic Travel Industry Association, Landsbankinn and other leading companies in Icelandic tourism.