Inside Out | Who are airlines kidding with their unrealistic ads when air travel is mostly a nightmarish experience?
- Airline travel is not what it’s made out to be by marketing and advertising wizards, as all of us have been scarred by many painful experiences
- Surely airlines will be respected much more if their messages resembled their practical efforts to manage the painful reality of long-distance travel
Each long plane journey I take – and there are likely to be many of them this year as Chile chairs our Apec meetings – reminds me of the excruciating mismatch between the reality of global air travel, and the preposterous fairy tales spun by airlines’ marketing and advertising wizards.
And I’m not talking about the awful Boeing 737 MAX tragedies that haunt deep parts of every air traveller’s brain. I’m just talking about the normal numbing reality of air travel.
I have been provoked in recent months by two television advertisements in particular: one from Singapore Airlines that morphs from an elderly couple being served what looks like a birthday cake by the usual serene Singapore Girl, while sitting serenely on a lounger balanced on a massive rocky outcrop as the sun sets over a wide calm ocean, to the same elderly couple sumptuously bedding down in their first class Singapore Airlines cabin.
The second comes from Qatar Airways, and stars a beautiful young couple and their two cherubic children as they wander up stairways lined by stewardesses holding up twirling umbrellas, across sunset-toasted beaches, and onto gently bouncing clouds. The tagline: “The World Like Never Before”.
Who do they think they are kidding?