The girlfriendly skies?

Mark from Slap Upside the Head sent me an AP article from MSNBC about Air New Zealand putting on a “Pink Flight” from San Francisco to Sydney for the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. According to the article, the flight “will feature drag queens, pink cocktails and a cabaret performed by the flight crew.” Other airlines have done this sort of thing for years, but Air New Zealand only started direct flights to/form San Francisco relatively recently.

The article goes on to quote Jodi Williams, “an Air New Zealand marketing director” as saying:

We are looking at tailoring the inseat entertainment and having gay-friendly movies and contests and different music and things like that.

The airline will also host a “Get Onboard Girlfriend” party for passengers, the article says.

This may sound a bit odd to gay people in other parts of the world, but in Australia and New Zealand, drag queens are a huge part of the GLBT community. And where there are drag queens, there's likely to be cabaret performances (think the Australian film “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”). In a sense, this is preparing passengers for what they're about to be part of.

Still, this may not exactly be the sort of thing that American gay men, who are likely the target audience, would expect to see. Here, it would be just the opening of the party weekend.

Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is purpoted to be the world's largest gay and lesbian event. Whether it is or not, it's worth millions of dollars a year to the ecomomies of Sydney and New South Wales. Other Australian states try to lure GLBT travellers who have come for Mardi Gras.

There's been no local coverage of this, which doesn't really surprise me, since the flight is from America. But I also couldn't easily find any information about it on the airline's websites.

Still, if you're going to Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras from Sydney, there are worse ways to travel.

After I wrote this, and before I posted it, I read Joe.My.God who also blogged about this. At the time I read the post, most of the comments took it all postively.