Badvert of the Month: Vueling
Vueling advert spotted at Saint Pancras train station, London
While parts of Southern Europe were baking in lethal heatwaves, following record breaking temperatures in cities and countries elsewhere in the world, hundreds of tourists had to be evacuated from Greek due to raging wildfires, blaming tourist agencies for mishandling the situation. At the same time, airline advertising continues unabated, promoting the most polluting way to travel to destinations that are now being wrecked by the consequences of that pollution. By comparison, a campaign by the unofficial Ministry for the Climate Emergency outlines what genuine holiday adverts might look like, featuring common tourism destinations ravaged by the damages caused by mass tourism and the climate crisis.
Reckless climate-wrecking adverts
Despite the lethal irony, the airline and tourism industries are still heavily promoting their business-as-usual holiday model based on frequent flying - as if many holiday hotspots were not now so hot that they are literally going up in flames. Worse, these adverts promoting “cheap” flights that in fact cost the world dearly, even appear alongside articles denouncing the damage they do, and how the aviation industry profiteers from promoting our self-destruction. In an opinion piece in the UK’s Guardian, Badvertising’s Andrew Simms reviewed the aviation industry’s promotion strategies alongside its total absence of meaningful climate action plans and the fact it has missed 98 percent of its climate targets. But that very article was used to promote adverts from the airline company Vueling (see image below) promoting ‘low-cost flights’ from Paris to Southern European holiday destinations in Spain and Portugal.
Vueling airline ads in the Guardian comments piece about airline advertising’s climate harm
The reckless nature of this advertising has got to stop. But online advertising - and the clever algorithm behind it - works by words of association and it is therefore not uncommon that media articles featuring the climate crisis, and specifically calling-out polluting industries, end up targeted by advertising from these same companies. In a similar vein, recent articles in the Financial Times on the climate crisis were targeted by sponsored content from the fossil fuel industry (see image below)
Financial Times’ sponsored content by oil giant Aramco - 1st August 2023
There is no other way to address the problem than by ending this advertising for heavily polluting products and services altogether, as we did for tobacco advertising. Given the urgency the situation calls for, and the lack of policies to manage and reduce demand in-line with our climate targets, an easy and common sense policy for governments and institutions would be to start by ending the advertising of the most polluting products and activities.
Planes on the Brain
The airline industry is well aware of its climate problem and the rising anti-flying sentiment following the rise of ‘flygskam’ (literally ‘flight-shame’) and the growing enthusiasm for low-carbon forms of transport like train travel.
Its advertising, if not the industry itself, is increasingly green in the colour of its language. Green(er) slogans prevail that most often amount to plain greenwashing. Indeed, the climate campaign group Possible’s latest research on private jets reviews all the industry’s fake climate solutions and explains why these don’t address aviation’s climate problem.
At Badvertising, we frequently criticise these strategies. In a recent animation, narrated by commerciogenic disease expert Dr. Kris Van Tulleken, (these are illnesses linked to the commercial promotion of products that prove harmful) we show how airline advertising has penetrated deep into our brains and way of behaving as a result of the airline industry’s slick promotion techniques.
It is exactly this type of advert, like those featured above from Vueling, that promote the idea of flying as something normal and desirable, luring customers with the promises of low-cost holiday abroad. The notion that global, flight-based tourism should no longer be the norm now we have entered “the era of global boiling” in the words of the UN’s chief Antonio Guterres, is never raised.
Company Background:
Vueling is a Spanish low-cost airline and the largest in the country measured by fleet size and number of destinations. In 2019, it carried more than 34 million passengers and in 2021, the company served 122 destinations across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Vueling has bases at Viladecans, Barcelona, Paris-Orly and Rome Fiumicino airports. The airline recorded a profit of more than one million euros for the year 2021, and recently announced it is opening a new route from Paris-Orly to Amman in Jordan as of October 2023.
As part of the International Airlines Group (IAG), the company is aiming to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) play a central part in the company’s sustainability strategy, which aims to double its share to 10 percent by 2030. However, the company itself is raising doubts about the suitability of SAF, citing its highly prohibitive costs.