Travelers may recall less safety info if in-flight safety video promotes tourism

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — 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.

“This research was motivated, in part, by the popularity of these newer safety videos,” said Yaqi Gong, doctoral candidate in recreation, park and tourism management at Penn State and first author of this study. “A 'Lord of the Rings'-themed safety video created by Air New Zealand has been viewed more than 25 million times on YouTube. It was clear that these videos were grabbing people’s attention, so we wanted to determine if they affected people’s travel plans and ability to recall safety information.”

After evaluating safety-demonstration videos from 55 nationally affiliated airlines, the researchers selected four — Nepal Airlines, Air Mauritius, Sri Lankan Airlines and Singapore Airlines — for their experiment on the impact of local tourism content in the safety videos.

Many airlines — including all carriers in the United States — were excluded from the study because the researchers only studied flagship carriers for nations. Flagship airlines were more likely to be invested and involved in national tourism promotion, the researchers said.

The researchers recruited 214 adults in the United States using an online platform. Participants watched one of the four airline safety videos and then filled out a questionnaire about what they saw and remembered from the video.

Study participants who watched a video with live-action, local images reported a positive impression of the destination country and said it influenced which destinations they would want to visit. This result demonstrated that safety videos with local content can effectively market a nation and influence people’s experience on their visit, the researchers said.

“A visit does not begin when you arrive on the ground in a nation,” said Bing Pan, professor of recreation, park, and tourism management at Penn State and Gong’s doctoral adviser. “A visit starts on the plane, especially if you are travelling on a nation’s flag-carrying airline. By creating a positive image and association in the mind of a traveler, these videos can change the impression people have of a place, which can encourage and enhance tourist activity. Additionally, these images can influence what visitors want to see in the nation.”

On the other hand, the researchers also found that participants who watched videos with local content were 11% less likely to answer safety questions correctly.

“It seems that there is a tradeoff between engaging content and remembering safety instructions,” Pan said. "It is possible that exciting local images distract people from the safety messaging. This may be why they remembered less of the important information.”

The researchers cautioned that if the study were replicated in a more natural environment — such as on an actual airplane — the results might be different.

“In our study, people focused on watching the safety video as part of the study, and it presumably had their attention,” Pan explained. “On airplanes, people may be more likely to pay attention to a beautiful video with local content while ignoring a more standard safety video. So, a real-world, in-flight test would confirm whether this result is generally applicable.”

The vast majority of study participants did not recall safety information with much accuracy, regardless of which video they watched. On average, participants correctly answered around two out of five basic, true-or-false questions about airline safety — such as “True or false: If you have a child, put on the oxygen mask for your child first,” and “True or false: Baggage should be left on the flight when there is an emergency evacuation” — immediately after watching the safety demonstration video.

Given the importance of these demonstrations to passenger safety, the researchers said they found this result troubling.

“Most people retained less than half of the critical information from the safety-demonstration videos, so everyone really needs to pay attention to safety demonstrations — whether or not those videos are engaging,” Gong said. “You may think you know the safety information, but our data shows there is a good chance you do not. So, please watch the safety demonstration. It could save your life.”

Bingjie “Becky” Liu-Lastres, associate professor of tourism, event and sport management at Indiana University Indianapolis, contributed to this study.