Skytrax is a consultancy firm who have invented the frankly meaningless concept of star-ratings for airlines – and the world has bought into it. The Skytrax page for “5-star airlines”:
http://www.airlinequality.com/StarRanking/5star.htm
lists six carriers: Asiana, Cathay Pacific, Kingfisher, Malaysia, Qatar and Singapore.

This means that Qatar’s previous ad campaign, based on the utterly spurious notion of being “The world’s five-star airline”, clashed with the Skytrax rating system, since there were five others who qualified for that title. Maybe Qatar’s creative campaign team had never heard of Skytrax when they designed the original ads – or perhaps Skytrax awarded five-star status to the others after Qatar’s ads had aired. Who knows? Or cares?

But it is the lack of exclusivity on Skytrax’s five-star page which means that Qatar had to change their ads. But rather than design a whole new campaign, they just dropped the word “the”, reckoning (rightly) that virtually nobody would notice. They are now just one “five-star airline” among six. Diddums.

Check out Korean Air’s Excellence in Flight. They know how to make a decent airline advert.

TT

Buck

Um…. are you getting out enough, Matthew?

;)