In the last decade, many airlines have incorporated videos into their mandatory in-flight safety demonstrations. Several national flagship airlines - including Air New Zealand, Singapore Airlines and Qantas - also began to include footage related to their home countries in those videos. Over time, the videos developed the dual purposes of safety instruction and tourism marketing, according to researchers in the Penn State Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management. Rather than educating passengers on both safety measures and the country, however, the researchers found a tradeoff between how much safety content viewers retained and how effectively a video promoted tourism.
According to the United States National Transportation Safety Board, attentiveness to safety demonstrations is one of the most critical determinants of passenger survival in aircraft accidents. To understand which safety videos most effectively engaged passengers, the researchers in the current study explored the effectiveness of safety-demonstration videos containing tourism content and other videos without tourism content. The researchers found that images of local content positively influenced people's images of a country but also reduced the number of safety protocols those viewers remembered.
The study was recently published in Journal of Travel Research.
