Travel companies should stop playing publicity stunts that disrupt our lives

My mother was reminded of her 1993 trip to Russia, when former leader Boris Yeltsin had renamed a clutch of street names in Moscow, and everyone was very lost. It’s one thing when it’s the end of an era in Russia, arguably, and quite another when it’s a fashion house.

Marketing gaffes such as TfL’s have long been causing us problems, of course. During the 1960s, a United Airlines campaign dubbed “take me along” encouraged business flyers to bring their wives on corporate trips with them at discounted rates. It seriously backfired when wives started receiving “thank-you” letters from United regarding flights they’d never taken. Extramarital affairs were revealed. United lost a lot of frequent flyers.

Today, when travel companies aren’t wasting money on weird ads and events, they are regularly making enemies of their customers by employing “trendy” (and in many cases, snarky) social media teams to handle complaints in lieu of helpful agents. In all seriousness though, if brands have cash to fritter on appearing (and often failing) to look cool, I’d like to see at least some of it redistributed to gimmicks that actually solve problems. Allow me to suggest a couple.

First up, pedestrian fast lanes, please. Everywhere, ideally, to syphon off dawdlers from those of us with purpose or in a hurry, but at the very least on public transport. It’s been done before. In 2014, in response to a 10-year-old girl from Sheffield who wrote a letter to the Meadowhall Shopping Centre about slow walkers being “so annoying I want to scream”, the mall actually installed – in a temporary PR move – two lanes. 

In China, there’s a 100ft stretch of pavement dedicated to phone starers at a theme park in Chongqing called “Foreigner Street”, which gives me some hope for the future of crowd control.