I fly a lot in this job, domestic and international. There are often those moments when I don’t want to write because I’m wiped out from a work trip. I don’t want to dig into a book. And, unless I have an article published in it, I don’t often reach for the inflight magazine. For those moments, there was always the SkyMall catalog.
My brain could idle for a bit while I shopped for cool gadgets I didn’t need and items I didn’t know existed. I took some small comfort knowing that, if I ever needed a six foot high Sasquatch statue, I knew where to go.Sadly, SkyMall packed it in during a sad bankruptcy, leaving ll of our seat-back pockets a little emptier.
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Now, a form of replacement is taking off with SKY2BUY – a “new Mall in the Sky,” inspired by Duty Free Shops. It’s in some planes during this current test marketing period and should find more happy hands in the air if it (pun intended) takes off successfully.
The minds behind SKY2BUY want to move away from the gadgets and Bigfoots in favor of more luxury items.
But, here’s the tricky bit. Rather than developing a stand-alone publication, SKY2BUY will be an advertising section in pre-existing airline publications. So, rather than publish a separate publication, SKY2BUY will add a few pages to an inflight magazine.
Cooperating with in-flight magazines seems like a sound cost-saving measure for SKY2BUY. SkyMall paid more than $350,000 annually to each airline in fuel surcharges — the cost of packing the magazines onboard. By joining up with the in-flights, the new SKY2BUY reduces the amount of print materials on each flight.
We can only hope maybe a statue of a Chupacabra might sneak in there somewhere.
