Be Nice and Get Free Plane Tickets

(Atlanta, GA) Probably everyone has now heard of the novel promotional scheme introduced by Delta Air Lines to give away tickets to "nice passengers" on their cattle-car subsidiary SONG. How nice! Aren't they just a wonderful company?

Of course, Delta is not revealing its researchers' assumed development of a secret Nice-O-Meter to be used in determining who should get the free tickets. Without an impartial Nice-O-Meter, the selection of recipients for the free tickets would be made by regular human beings who tend to decide based on self-interest. Oh, let's say, fifty dollars! Someone gets a free ticket and a less-than-saintly flight attendant gets a job benefit.

All joking aside, if one analyzes the whole scheme, it makes some sense. With 5,000 round trip tickets to be given away at an assumed average cost to the airline of $400, the total expenditure for the program will be about two million dollars, or approximately the cost of one commercial ad during the Super Bowl. In return, the airline will get widespread publicity throughout all media for weeks and an infectious word-of-mouth buzz for months. Already, just due to the novelty of the initiative, news websites from around the world (see BBC and AsiaOne) have reported the story. The value of announcing the names Delta and SONG along with the words nice and free tickets throughout the US and the world is incalculable. From an advertising perspective alone, any reasonable cost-benefit analysis would conclude that the free ticket program is brilliant.

Nonetheless, some skepticism has arisen about whether the program will result in more ticket sales or not and about whether the dollars couldn't be spent more productively elsewhere. Industry expert Terry Trippler commented "it would make more sense to reward employees who are nice as an incentive for better customer service." I can't argue with that logic.

My take is that the program will probably be successful as an advertising gimmick. As for the nicety aspect, it's hooey. I refuse to believe that airline management cares much about whether their customers are nice or not. Delta's focus is to get as many paying customers as possible to snugly place their back pockets intimately adjacent to the airline's upholstery. That would be their definition of "nice."