Air France-KLM Flying Blue Turns a Cancelled Tokyo Trip Into a Global Story
My 2020 Travel Project is a content campaign created by Isobar France, part of the Dentsu group, for Flying Blue, the Air France-KLM loyalty programme, published in France in April 2021, in which approximately 30 cameras were sent to Tokyo so that grounded photographer and Flying Blue member Jonathan Bertin could reconstruct his cancelled dream trip through the eyes of strangers.
The campaign centres on a single, resonant premise: travel is a state of mind as much as a physical act. When pandemic-era border closures made Bertin's planned Tokyo trip impossible, Flying Blue and Isobar devised a creative workaround. Cameras and detailed instructions were dispatched to Tokyo, where local participants photographed the city on Bertin's behalf, returning images that collectively recreated the journey he was unable to take. The resulting material was assembled into a film, a thirty-copy handcrafted book, and a dedicated website at my2020travelproject.com, all designed to bring the experience to Flying Blue's community of twenty million members. The project ran for approximately eight weeks, as reported by cbnews.fr, which covered the campaign on 17 May 2021 under the framing of an immobile journey. In France, where travel had become a charged cultural absence during the pandemic, the campaign spoke directly to an audience conditioned to defer, postpone, and dream. By placing a real loyalty programme member at the centre of the narrative rather than a fabricated persona, Flying Blue signalled that its community is not merely transactional but deeply human. The campaign was submitted to Clapboard by Damien Lebreuilly, Copywriter at Isobar, and earns a Clapboard Score of 67 out of 100, reflecting strong creative concept and emotional resonance tempered by limited measurable distribution reach relative to the programme's full membership scale.
Flying Blue serves twenty million members across the Air France-KLM network. That base represents not just a loyalty mechanism but a community of travellers who, through 2020 and into 2021, were collectively experiencing the same frustration: itineraries cancelled, destinations deferred, and wanderlust with nowhere to go. The strategic insight behind My 2020 Travel Project was to meet that frustration with empathy rather than promotionalism. Rather than offering miles or discounts, Flying Blue offered a story. According to the International Air Transport Association, global airline passenger volumes fell from 4.56 billion in 2019 to 1.779 billion in 2020 before a partial recovery to 2.304 billion in 2021, a year-on-year increase of roughly 29.5 percent but still nearly 50 percent below pre-pandemic levels. In France, where international travel is deeply embedded in cultural identity, that contraction was acutely felt. The campaign's choice of Tokyo as the destination was deliberate. Tokyo represents a long-haul aspiration for French travellers, a city of maximum contrast and cultural distance, making Bertin's unfulfilled trip symbolically potent for Flying Blue's European audience. Competitors including British Airways and Lufthansa also leaned into emotional and community-driven messaging during the same period, with British Airways running its Thank You campaign and Lufthansa emphasising the human cost of grounded travel, as noted by campaignlive.co.uk. What distinguished Flying Blue's approach was the participatory mechanics: rather than broadcasting a message about travel, the campaign literally reconstructed travel through collective human action, making the community the creative engine. This positioned Flying Blue not as a points programme but as a platform for shared experience, a meaningful distinction in a loyalty market defined by commoditised rewards.
Thibaud Le Jude de Segrais served as Executive Creative Director at Isobar, with Marc Badinand as Creative Director, Allan Huon as Art Director, and Damien Lebreuilly as Copywriter. Florent Hill and Guillaume Ferran shared directing and realisation duties, with Anthony Raton producing the project. The creative architecture of My 2020 Travel Project is built on a tension that gives the work its emotional charge: the gap between intention and reality, between the trip Bertin planned and the trip the world prevented. Isobar resolved that tension not by closing it but by bridging it through community participation. The thirty cameras sent to Tokyo were accompanied by specific instructions derived from Bertin's original itinerary, essentially asking strangers to see the city through the lens of someone who could not be there. The resulting photographs were then woven into a film that premiered to Flying Blue's member community, alongside a thirty-copy limited edition book that gave the project a physical, archival quality rarely associated with loyalty programme communications. The campaign also lived online at a dedicated microsite, where Bertin's journey was documented and made accessible beyond the programme's direct membership. CB News, reporting on 17 May 2021, described the execution as an immobile journey, a formulation that captures the creative paradox at the heart of the work. The influencer dimension was handled with restraint. Bertin is a professional photographer and genuine Flying Blue member, lending the campaign a credibility that distinguishes it from influencer marketing built on transactional endorsement. His community followed the project's development in real time, giving the content a serialised quality that sustained engagement across the campaign's approximate eight-week duration. Production credits are fully documented per Isobar's internal records, as cited by cbnews.fr and leclubdesda.org.
My 2020 Travel Project accumulated measurable industry recognition across multiple awards cycles. The Club des Directeurs Artistiques in France awarded the campaign a Silver in the Digital, Influencers category in its 2022 awards cycle, as recorded by leclubdesda.org. The One Show awarded the campaign three separate Merits in 2022: one in Branded Entertainment and Innovation, one in Social Media and Multiplatform, and one in Social Media and Influencer Marketing, as documented on the awards platform and corroborated by dentsu.com. Dentsu stated in April 2022 that the campaign was additionally shortlisted for the Clio Awards, The One Show's broader programme, and the Webby Awards, though no verified wins for those specific programmes are publicly available, per dentsu.com. The campaign's dedicated video asset recorded 12,889 views and 449 likes on its primary platform, with 49 comments, as reported by Clapboard. While these figures are modest relative to Flying Blue's twenty million-member base, they reflect the campaign's positioning as a quality content piece aimed at a curated audience rather than a mass-reach advertising burst. The structural effectiveness of the campaign lies in its multi-format distribution: a film, a limited physical book, a dedicated microsite, and influencer-led social distribution combined to create layered touchpoints. According to Clapboard's editorial assessment, the campaign's earned awards recognition validates the creative concept's resonance with industry peers even where direct consumer metrics remain limited. No additional verified performance data, such as loyalty programme engagement uplift or direct booking attribution, is publicly available for My 2020 Travel Project.
My 2020 Travel Project is a content campaign created by Isobar France for Flying Blue, the Air France-KLM loyalty programme, published in France in April 2021. It sent approximately 30 cameras to Tokyo so that grounded Flying Blue member Jonathan Bertin could reconstruct his cancelled trip through photographs taken by local participants on his behalf.
Isobar France, part of the Dentsu group, created the campaign. The team included Executive Creative Director Thibaud Le Jude de Segrais, Creative Director Marc Badinand, Art Director Allan Huon, Copywriter Damien Lebreuilly, and directors Florent Hill and Guillaume Ferran, with Anthony Raton as producer, as documented by cbnews.fr and leclubdesda.org.
The campaign won a Silver at the Club des Directeurs Artistiques in France in the Digital, Influencers category, per leclubdesda.org. The One Show awarded it three Merits in 2022 across Branded Entertainment and Innovation, Social Media Multiplatform, and Influencer Marketing categories. It was also shortlisted for the Clio Awards and Webby Awards, according to dentsu.com.
Jonathan Bertin is a professional photographer and genuine Flying Blue member whose cancelled 2020 Tokyo trip became the campaign's narrative foundation. His planned itinerary guided the instructions sent with the 30 cameras dispatched to Tokyo, and his community followed the project's development across its approximately eight-week duration, as reported by Clapboard.
The campaign reached Flying Blue's twenty million members through a dedicated microsite at my2020travelproject.com, a film, a thirty-copy limited edition book, and influencer-led social distribution. CB News covered the campaign on 17 May 2021, framing it as an immobile journey, extending its reach beyond the programme's direct community across the French market.
My 2020 Travel Project received a Clapboard Score of 67 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative concept and emotional resonance, recognising the campaign's participatory mechanics and award recognition, while noting that distribution reach remained limited relative to Flying Blue's full twenty million-member base, per Clapboard's editorial assessment.
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