Cathay Pacific connects travellers effortlessly to the world

With travel resuming to pre-pandemic levels, Cathay Pacific wanted to seize the opportunity to increase awareness and consideration amongst long-haul travellers to transit in Hong Kong with Cathay Pacific, ultimately driving conversion and sales.

In the transit landscape, we knew we were going up against established players like Dubai, Doha and Singapore’s Changi, all who already boast strong reputations for delivering great transit experiences. We wanted to close the perceptual gap of what we had to offer, ultimately giving flyers a reason to choose to transit through Hong Kong with Cathay Pacific. 

The reality is… no one likes to transit. People don’t transit because they want to, they transit because they have to; primarily because long haul flights become much cheaper with transit. We also knew that transiting was often an incredibly stressful experience for travellers, and what all transit travellers were looking for in their experience was just simply ease and seamlessness. 

Understanding this consumer mindset, we positioned Cathay Pacific as the partner that will do all the heavy lifting for travellers in transit so they don’t even have to think. Our strategic big idea, “Connections made easy” focused on delivering the most easy and seamless transit for travellers across both the flight and airport experience. 

To bring that vision  to life, our creative concept was built on the idea of The Art of Transit. We wanted to showcase all the effort we’ve gone in order to make transit more enjoyable than ever before your next destination, ultimately “Connecting you effortlessly to the world”.  For those flying Cathay Pacific, transit becomes an art form they can master effortlessly, because we've perfected it for them.

With this concept, we created a variety of social and digital assets that would target our key segment groups of: Solo travellers, Families and Couples, launched in an intentionally phased approach. 

For each segment, we first launched Instagram polls to tease out what really makes a difference to people when it comes to transiting and to understand the different priorities of different types of passengers. 

For example, we asked our community: “What is the best way to transit with kids?”  Keep them entertained OR Get some rest. 

We then incorporated the results from the Instagram polls into our social assets, highlighting different reasons why transiting via Hong Kong with Cathay Pacific would make for a seamless and enjoyable experience, from our Extensive network flight schedule  to the various Entertainment & Recharge Areas in the airport. We also then used the assets to direct travellers to curated airport itineraries to further maximise their transit experience.

Our campaign resulted in work that succeeded through the funnel, generating 340 million impressions, 1.3 million clicks and a reach of 268 million across both display and social channels, greatly exceeding our targets on all metrics. Importantly, our campaign also generated over 27,000 searches with the intention to book, and over 8,300 discounted tickets issued to customers within just the first month of the campaign.