Although I am a primarily overland traveler, there are times when flying is just a simple necessity. While I try to avoid short-haul flights as much as physically (and time-ly) possible, if you are going to heading from Europe to North America or Asia, you just simply have to get on a plane.
So when one of my favorite PR companies contacted me in recent weeks to do a bit of work with Air France, I was quite happy to oblige. In the last year, because of work commitments, I have started to fly a lot more and I’ve heard great things about Air France, so I’m totally up for trying them out. Plus, I love their classic posters. I even had some in my collections of vintage travel posters I’ve done up here a few times.
I need to do another one of those posts soon, actually.
Air France is celebrating their 80th birthday this year, so they chose five bloggers to highlight different types of travel possible through their airline – fashion, food, arts and culture, adventure, and entertainment and nightlife. I was the arts and culture proponent and so I needed to pick a location around the world that would be worth a trip.
So, I opened up the location selection to the fans on my Facebook page, who are simply fabulous. I gave them five choices of cities with a great arts and culture scene to choose from, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Cape Town, and they gave me their feedback all last week on which one I should choose.
From that feedback, and my thoughts on it all, I choose… Rio.
I didn’t realize this until writing this post, but I’ve only spent one day in Rio before and wrote this post about it. It is one of my old, old posts from my RTW trip and it was cool to do a search and remember a day I’d almost forgotten.
As I’ll also be going to the location on Air France, as would be one of my Twitter followers as part of the contest, so while I love all those cities, I must admit that I’m a complete fan now these days of soccer/football, which clearly counts as culture, and I’m going to be using my ticket to head to Brazil in June for the World Cup.
As to the contest to get the other ticket from Air France, it was simple. During a six hour period on Friday the 13th (lucky omen), people just needed to tweet at me and using #airfranceat80 why they should be selected to win a free, round-trip ticket from the UK to Rio. From those tweets, I’d choose a winner.
Here was the winner I chose.
@GoSeeWrite #AirFranceAt80 A picture is worth a thousand words (or 140 characters…) pic.twitter.com/w4NLMqdYkD
— nickiem (@nickiem) December 13, 2013
I think since she has been a close follower of my Facebook page, she knows I’m a sucker for great travel photography. And she put together an excellent montage there. Winner!
I’m quite looking forward to this partnership and hopefully it is just sign of things to come in the future. The World Cup has been on my list of things to do for years and the fact it is in a completely football crazy country makes it that much the better.
Viva Brazil! And Viva Air France!
I love flying Air France! I hope you enjoy your first experience with the airline (and Rio for the World Cup, of course!). That photo montage deserves the win.
never flown with them but i do love those posters!