No, I’ve not been on a plane for a while. And I’m not in a hurry to do so again, either, after seeing Charlie Victor Romeo on the Edinburgh Fringe this year, an utterly terrifying recreation of the ‘black box’ conversations from the cockpit of planes that have crashed, most of them with fatal results. As Chris Wilkinson wrote in a Guardian blog, it was quite possibly the greenest show in Edinburgh, at least in terms of its impact: “Ironically, the show that might actually have the most positive impact on reducing our carbon footprints, is Charlie Victor Romeo a piece that doesn’t mention the environment once… It’s a bleak, depressing bit of work - and once you have seen it, you are not going to want to set foot in a plane anytime soon.”
But if a theatre show is striving to keep me out of aeroplanes, aeroplanes are about to become the latest frontier for getting punters into the theatre. According to a story in Variety, flight attendants may soon be prowling the aisles in the sky asking, “Coffee? Tea? Tickets to Broadway?”
Presumably, however, they won’t be offering those seats on the aisle. That’s become part of another bizarre frontier on Broadway, in which the Jujamcyn chain are now going to mark up the aisle seats by between $17 and $25 apiece. As Michael Riedel commented in his New York Post column earlier this month, “After years of cramming people into the most uncomfortable seats in the world, theater owners now want to charge you for the privilege of not having bruises on your knees by intermission. Broadway’s never been so accommodating! But why stop at aisle seats?”, he wonders. “If the airlines can charge for headphones, why can’t Jujamcyn charge for infra-red hearing? A little deaf are you? Not our fault. That’ll be $15, please. You want the sound in both ears? Thirty dollars.”
Actually, Michael probably hasn’t flown First Choice airlines, as I did to Gran Canaria in July - and now, in fact, my last choice for travel —- where they just about charge you for everything already. (I was quite surprised that during the safety announcement they didn’t declare that, should you need a lifejacket, one can be purchased from the flight attendant as you leave the plane.) But now First Choice could have one more thing to sell to their customers, except that they don’t actually fly to New York yet. A new service called In-Flight Box Office is being launched that according to Variety will enable flight attendants “to hawk show tickets to passengers travelling on inbound flights to New York-area airports.” They will conduct transactions on handheld devices that can print out a voucher to be redeemed at the theatre’s box office for purchased seats. Updates on available ticket inventory will be sent wirelessly to the plane every two hours.
The pilot programme (no pun intended, apparently) will offer tickets to Chicago, Monty Python’s Spamalot, The Phantom of the Opera and Mamma Mia!, advertised onboard via a seatback information card and a PA announcement. But will it work? Will punters really decide to see a show on the basis of this kind of intervention? According to the Variety story, “Some 70% of Broadway auds travel to Gotham via an area airport, and in general, half of those haven’t scored tickets by the time they arrive.”
That’s an awful lot of flying - perhaps they need to be sent to Charlie Victor Romeo first - but also suggests a lot of people leaving their decisions about what to actually see until after they arrive. But part of that may be driven by waiting for a bargain. One of the biggest changes and challenges to theatrical finances on both sides of the Atlantic has been the substantial drop in advance sales; people don’t plan so far ahead anymore. And nervous theatre owners and producers, looking at seating plans with plenty of availability, in turn release as many tickets as they can to the discount market, either via the half price TKTS booth or online offers.
The onboard offers may catch a few unsuspecting tourists along the way - but those that don’t will find that they can see the same shows at half price if they wait till they arrive. Producers aren’t going to complain about another effort that helps them to shift tickets - but the onboard offer needs to be a premium service if it is going to justify getting passengers to make a commitment to what to see before they step off the plane. Or it needs to offer discounts, too.
But it’s time is surely limited, too - though early attempts to introduce airborne internet access floundered when Boeing pulled the plug on the its Connexion broadband internet service (which operated on board Lufthansa, SAS and Austrian Airlines flights), other systems are being tested - and it surely won’t be long before you can book tickets online as you fly instead.
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