An Exploratory Study of In-Flight Safety Videos and Airline Marketing Strategy

Introduction

In today’s modern world, traveling has become more common. With the emergence of social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat, air travel has increased tremendously in recent years as travelers share first-hand experiences online (Borgogna, 2016). In the aviation industry, a government entity known as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ensures passengers’ safety as a top priority. In an effort to promote safety awareness to the passengers, the FAA mandated the commercial airlines to present passengers on board with an in-flight safety video. The in-flight safety video is a pre-recorded video that explicitly presents safety instructions and procedures aimed to be delivered to passengers onboard.

Passengers have often reported these pre-safety briefings to be considered boring and repetitive, and are sometimes ignored (Seneviratne & Molesworth, 2015). This presents the argument that numerous airlines have considered and have therefore transformed their safety videos into more interesting means to attract passengers’ attention, such as Air New Zealand (Plautz, 2016). However, recent trends from commercial airlines such as Air New Zealand and Virgin America have attracted millions of YouTube views through their pre-flight safety videos, encouraging viral marketing (Plautz, 2016). This begs the question as to whether airlines are incorporating entertaining content to the in-flight safety video to market their own airlines, or for passenger information retention purposes. As such, the objective of this chapter is to explore in- flight safety videos presented to passengers as a form of marketing, for numerous airlines ranging from premium to budget airlines. The remainder of the chapter includes the background of the in-flight safety video, addressing varying perspectives from the academic literature, followed by research methodology, contribution, and managerial implications.