Air Explore

To boost the image of the Air Explore brand and introduce the airline’s new Bratislava – Split route, the first direct connection between Slovakia and Croatia in 8 years.

The campaign took place in July 2020, only few months after the start of the covid-19 pandemic, when international travel was slowly starting to resume. At the time, many travelers considered air travel as highly risky due to coronavirus infection or complications related to border closures.

A coordinated PR and marketing campaign with Pelikan.sk, who was also the exclusive flight ticket seller. A communications plan was created and implemented across all the channels of all partners – Air Explore (website content, social media) and Pelikan.sk (social media, newsletter and homepage banners, Pelipecky.sk content marketing, Pelikan’s affiliates) and Bratislava Airport (website banners and social media).

The PR campaign was launched by a press conference at the Bratislava Airport. Significant attention was created thanks to several rounds of competitions for flight tickets on social media and a blogger trip in collaboration with Pelipecky.sk, which resulted in live-coverage of the inaugural flight and a detailed report of the experience with the airline and destination.

Content-wise, the focus was not only on Air Explore’s brand, its services, fleet, route and destination, but also on the hygiene and safety precautions onboard, before and after, in order to rebuild traveler confidence in air travel at the height of the pandemic.

Continuous coverage in the most important Slovak online, print and broadcast media – over 100 media impacts in the 2 month PR campaign, in Slovakia and also abroad. A detailed media coverage is available below the text.

Air Explore’s new route was covered by all major and also smaller online news portals in Slovakia. These included Aktuality.sk (several articles with a total of 90 000 viewers), Sme.sk, Pluska.sk, Hnonline.sk, Topky.sk, Pravda.sk, Cas.sk, Zoznam.sk, Tvnoviny.sk, Etrend.sk, Startitup.sk, Dennikn.sk, Postoj.sk, Refresher.sk and others.

It was also featured in prime time TV news on all major Slovak TV broadcasters – Markiza, Joj, RTVS and TA3.

Social media campaign via Pelikan.sk channels reached over 750 000 people.

In the last month of the campaign, the flights achieved nearly 100% capacity.

Split became Nr.1 best-selling destination for Pelikan.sk in the course of the campaign and in a YtY comparison, sales performance of Split increase by almost 270%.