Title	VISA RECYCLING
Brand	S7 AIRLINES
Product/Service	AIRLINES
Category	G03. Single-market Campaign
Entrant	GREAT ADVERTISING GROUP St. Petersburg, RUSSIA
Idea Creation	GREAT St.Petersburg, RUSSIA

Name	Company	Position
Ilya Litnitskiy	Great	Head of client service team
Tatiana Shipkova	Great	Client service
Andrey Danskov	Great	Head of creative team
Sergey Fateev	Great	Art direction
Igor Sparin	Great	Copywriting
Olga Ivanova	Great	Copywriting

Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

The Visa Recycling Project is a simple and efficient way to reach a new level of trust by finding a solution to consumer problems. It is a way of bringing a person and the brand together in the context of common problems and difficulties brought to us in 2020.

Background

Russia closed flights with most European countries in March 2020. Even now in 2021, international air traffic still hasn't been fully restored: many countries are closed, and visas that have not been used for a year are going useless in passports. S7, among other things, was forced to reduce the number of destinations it can offer. In this situation, one of the most important business tasks was to support domestic flights to compensate overall air traffic reduction.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

March 2021 It’s been a year since Russia has closed flights to most European countries. During the pandemic year, thousands of Schengen visas have burned out. People have lost their trips, visas and hope to come back to normal. Business also has been worried as with the complete cancellations of international flights, the domestic passenger traffic not oly did not increase, but dropped down in fact. To encourage people to travel domestically with S7 Airlines, on the anniversary of the pandemic travel lockdown, we have launched a Visa Recycling Project. Anyone could exchange expired within a year Schengen visa for miles. The only thing you have to do is to become a member of the S7 Priority program and to register an expired visa on a special website. That’s it. Now with your Schengen visa and S7 travel miles it’s even easier to visit any of the Russian cities.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

The main focus: New customers or company customers who have not yet registered for the S7 Priority program. S7 Priority Program members additionally. We have found the most powerful consumer insight formed by the pandemic - those who are active travellers got extremely disappointed by the fact that their visas became useless. This fact became the target of numerous jokes and memes. Put that in context, people regret wasting money, which could never be regained, on visa applications. That is why we have decided to find a way to help people to use these “useless” visas at least somehow.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

We have created a simple and user-friendly landing page where users could fill in their expired Schengen visa number and get some bonus miles for that. In order to promote domestic flights, we have created a series of counterintuitive messages urging people to travel around Russia using their Schengen visa (“Schengen to Sheregesh”, “Schengen to Sochi”, “Schengen to Irkutsk”, etc.) We have chosen to launch the project in March 2021 since it was the month when borders were closed last year due to the pandemic. Information about the promotion and provocative messages appeared on travel portals, travel-public pages and other theme-based resources. The campaign was supposed to last for a whole month but the interest in promotion was so huge that 5 000 000 miles allocated for it were fully converted within 2 weeks.

List the results (30% of vote)

> 2,4 mln – total coverage with only owned media > 1000 share in social networks > 10 000 visas were recycled 5 mln miles go fo recycling visas

Please tell us how the work was designed / adapted for a single country / region / market.

We not only offered people to exchange their “burned” visas into miles but also found a counterintuitive format to describe a promotion to Russian people - to go off on a journey in your home country “using Schengen” while focusing on most popular tourist destinations.