Maps on the move: how ‘geotainment’ could drive new airline revenues

Geographic content in the travel business is not new, but the growing number of geo-entertainment products and services could provide opportunities for airlines to build their brand and drive ancillary revenues via advertising. Pamela Whitby takes a look.

Everybody is talking about the importance of relevant, contextual, location-based content as being essential to differentiating in a competitive market. Where better to offer this to customers than via the most popular service used by air travellers – namely the interactive flight map. “Passengers spend more time watching the moving map than any other type of in-flight entertainment,” says Ben Jarman, project coordinator of Hidden Journeys, a not-for-profit educational project that explores the incredible places travellers see from the air as they fly over them.

Downtown Doha by Elmar Bajo

Indeed, one of the biggest buzzwords in travel is ‘content’ and Hidden Journeys is one company that is doing more than simply providing a series of images. Instead, it builds a story, a narrative that is compelling, educational and contextually meaningful to the traveller. It was an understanding of the importance of this that led to the launch of the Hidden Journeys website back in November 2010 when the Royal Geographical Society spotted an opportunity to use its resources to create guides to certain flight paths. This would allow passengers to learn about and engage with some of the spectacular parts of the Earth they fly over.

So, for example, on a flight from London to Johannesburg or Nairobi passengers start by flying over the wealthy economic and financial hub of London but will cross some of the world’s poorest settlements of the Sahel before landing. From the Alps to Mount Kilamanjaro, the Sahara desert to the rainforests of the Congo, travellers also fly over some of the coldest and hottest parts of the world. With images and text collected and carefully collated by the RGS, Hidden Journeys builds a compelling narrative about the cities, regions and places travellers fly over. This content is triggered by a GPS signal, in real-time, when the plane is in range of a particular location. “This is much more than Google Earth, it is about building a compelling, beautiful narrative that both engages and educates,” says Jarman.

Kilimanjaro by Charlie Bolden 

Commercial opportunities

This is beginning to look increasingly commercially viable with Georadio, Mondo Window and Hidden Journeys all companies offering so-called ‘geo-tainment’ in some form or other. So far, however, the airlines have been slow to incorporate such content onto moving maps, but this is changing.

Hidden Journeys, for one, is making headway and is currently working with California-based in flight-entertainment provider (IFE), Airborne Interactive, to integrate its content into the moving map of a major airline. This consists of providing points of interest along flight routes that are illustrated with high-quality images and informative captions which pop up as the aircraft flies over a point-of-interest, explains Jarman. The agreement should be officially announced later this summer.

Geo-entertainment in the air may have been slow to take off, but it is already happening on some trains and ITES, or in-train, on-demand touchscreen entertainment systems, are now available on some new Great Western high-speed trains in the UK. The technology, developed by a company called Volo TV, allows passengers to watch films, play games and interact with journey guides, while also telling you where you are, the train speed, and altitude. The entertainment content provided by Volo TV is supported by an interactive advertising model, so each time passenger plugs in his or her email address or mobile phone details to the system, the information goes directly to the advertiser (via cellular networks) and Volo TV makes money. Volo reportedly makes a £1 for each contact handed over to advertisers, as well as selling ad space.

So if the trains are doing it, the airlines can too.

Although Hidden Journeys’ primary aim is to educate, advertising is where Jarman believes there are real, ancillary revenue building opportunities for airlines. Geo-entertainment is certainly a growing industry in IFE, as the moving map has been identified as an under-utilised platform for companies to get their message across to a large audience. 

As Jarman points out, not only is it the most watched screen, it is also the one screen that is relevant to every passenger aboard an aircraft. It is also main point of interaction between the airline and the customer. So the ‘moving map’ presents and real opportunities for location-based advertising or destination marketing. “As you are flying over a certain place, there could be adverts for products and services in that destination,” says Jarman. Companies at the point of arrival could also use this as an opportunity to place adverts that are relevant to customers about to start their holiday.

The halo effect

On top of that there are opportunities for brand building. And Hidden Journeys is actively using social media to raise the profile of the project and generate brand awareness both with users and within the inflight entertainment and travel industry. Passengers are being encouraged to tweet their images from the sky with the hashtag ‘hiddenjourneys’. Jarman believes that if passengers leave an aircraft feeling they have had unique experience, “it can really halo effect on rest of service” which could have a commercial benefit in the longer term.  

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