New amenity kits are often greeted with fanfare, such as Ben Schlappig’s (One Mile at a Time) recent heralding of the Acqua Di Parma amenity kit in Air Canada’s Signature Class. I’m one of those flyers who loves getting amenity kits. They look stylish and it’s nice to be greeted by them at my seat. Amenity kits make me feel happy despite the fact that the contents of a typical amenity kit are mostly useless and disposable. This irony says something fundamental about the human psyche – we like getting things for free. If the gift makes an experience memorable and wins customer loyalty at a small cost, the savvy marketers at the airline would have done their job well.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the anatomy of an airline amenity kit. Most often, it comes in a high quality, durable and reusable pouch. Sometimes, it’s a different sort of receptacle, such as this cool tin box by Victorinox that I got on Swiss Airlines.
The kit may be branded by a company (e.g., Hackett, Acqua Di Parma, or Victorinox), or it may carry the branding of the airline, such as this good-sized Polaris-branded leather pouch.
The contents of the kit may range from sample-sized high-end toiletries by the companies that hope to convert you to their products, to cheap airline-branded socks, eye-masks, ear plugs and dental kits.
While I like getting amenity kits, the truth is that I don’t have much use for them. Sometimes I plunder the kits for the things I like (usually the socks, lotion and dental kit), but usually I take the whole kit home as a memento of my flight; it’s part of my now-reflexive mindset of documenting my trips, and there’s nothing better for preserving a memory than a physical keepsake.
Often the kits go to my kids who love to get them. Anytime they get free stuff from or on planes, their expressions remind me of my childhood delight at getting airline-branded freebies from Singapore Airlines like puzzles, playing cards and stuffed toys. The delight of being given something is how people develop emotional attachments to travel brands – I love flying Singapore Airlines to this day because of the memory of that feeling. Based on my loyalty to them and all the money I’ve spent buying expensive junk in the form of limited edition “airline exclusives” (like my recent purchases of Hello Kitty Singapore Girl and Jellycat Jumble Mouse with batik motif), I would say that all those cheap freebies achieved their ultimate objective of creating my affection and loyalty to the Singapore Airlines brand.
(Or perhaps I’m subconsciously trying to make restitution to the airline for all the people of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation who plundered the cutlery from the planes. Based on the responses to a recent Facebook post I made, this kleptomania appears to be a pervasive generational issue.)
Now, let’s dig a little deeper into the referenced Acqua Di Parma kit from Air Canada, which I received on a recent flight from Narita to Vancouver. Typical of amenity kits, the pouch is the best thing about it. It’s a good-sized eye-catching bright yellow one which I will probably reuse. The guts of it are predictable: lip balm and sample-sized lotion by the perfumier, and an assortment of AC-branded and unbranded junk – eye-mask, glasses lens cleaner, dental kit, socks and ear plugs. Disposable and arguably wasteful, but appreciated nonetheless because it was gifted and shows that the airline values my patronage. Some airlines, like Singapore, only hand out amenity kits on request to prevent waste, which is friendlier from an environmental standpoint while appeasing customers who value the kits.
At the end of the day, amenity kits are akin to “adult Happy Meal toys,” as former Air Canada E-Commerce Manager Chris Morello once quipped. Durability isn’t really the point. Airlines provide them because they understand the simple psychological principle that giving people things makes them happy. It’s savvy marketing, as these kits leave an impression of the airline brand that outlasts the journey.