Packing for Christmas travel

The video above isn’t an ad, exactly, but a sort of instructional video for people flying with Air New Zealand this Christmas. It’s useful enough, but it’s also clearly a follow on from their “Mirry Christmus” TV ad. And, maybe because of that, it just works.

I got a YouTube alert about this video today, and I wasn’t going to watch it. After all, I’m not travelling anywhere this year (fortunately!!), so I didn’t really need to know whatever they were saying. However, having seen their ad, this was more appealing to me than it otherwise would have been.

Having said all that, it’s confusing as hell. For example, where, precisely are batteries/battery packs supposed to be packed? When we left New Zealand, the airline had a video playing in the “self-check-in” area that showed batteries and battery packes being put into checked luggage. Same for umbrellas. Yet elsewhere we saw umbrellas being allowed on the flight to New Zealand (this didn’t matter, it’s just the confusion of it all).

So, I think the idea of this video is really good—cute, even. But such things need to be painfully obvious to avoid confusing the travelling public. Travel is stressful enough, as I was saying the other day, and airlines really should be doing everying they can to reduce stress and confusion. This video, cute though it is, doesn’t meet that high standard, in my opinion.

But it IS kinda Christmasy…