Quench Your Wanderlust By Taking a Mock Flight To Your “Holiday Destination”
How much do you miss going on holidays? Enough to buy tickets for a flight and holiday that is make-believe? Well, some people are.
When First Airlines, a Tokyo-based company, started offering mock flight experiences paired with virtual reality in 2017, it must have had some premonition about the state of the world today. In the midst of the pandemic, most commercial flights have been grounded and holiday plans cancelled. The “virtual aviation facility”, as the company calls itself, has seen a 50% rise in bookings since the start of the pandemic.
The experience includes all the best parts of flying if you could afford first-class, including a luxury lounge before boarding and spacious airplane seats used in the actual First Class section of the Airbus 310 340. Staff dressed in flight attendant attire attend to passengers as a flight steward would.
Four-course meals are customised based on the destination: Roast Pork Shoulder with Pineapple Sauce en route to Hawaii or Cheesecake if you are heading to New York. All the while, you’ll see clouds and sky pass by on the TV-screen “windows”.
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Of course, you don’t get to arrive and holiday at the destination. Instead, you can experience it via a VR headset that brings you on ground tours of your chosen destination, as long as it is Paris, Rome, Helsinki, New York, Hawaii, California or New Zealand.
To scratch your wanderlust itch with First Airline, you’d have to shell out 6,580 yen or US$62 per ticket for the two-hour experience – way cheaper than a real flight ticket.
Actual flight operators have gotten creative in offering round-trip sightseeing flights, with passengers never disembarking until they return to where they boarded. Australia’s Qantas Airline and Antarctica Flights tour company partnered to offer a 12-hour flight over the icy continent, and Taiwanese Eva Air offers 3-hour flight along coastlines – oh, and kids will love it for its Hello Kitty theme, with seats adorned and food prepared to match the theme.
