SAS launched 'The Arrivals' in Denmark in October 2018, a covertly filmed airport reunions campaign that earned three Effie Awards and more than 40 million
SAS Turns Copenhagen Airport Into a Stage for Human Connection
SAS launched 'The Arrivals' on October 30, 2018, a covertly filmed brand film capturing genuine reunion moments inside Copenhagen Airport's arrivals hall, created by Danish agency &Co. as part of the airline's long-running 'We Are Travelers' platform, with the central premise that travel returns people to those who love them fundamentally changed.
The campaign marks the seventh instalment under the 'We Are Travelers' platform, which SAS has sustained from approximately 2014 through 2022, according to sasgroup.net. It also represents the first 'We Are Travelers' film led by &Co., which had taken over the account from Åkestam Holst within the NoA network, as documented on Andco Dk. Rather than positioning the airline around destinations or fares — the conventional grammar of travel advertising — 'The Arrivals' focuses entirely on the emotional consequence of a journey: the homecoming. The single film asset released in Denmark in October 2018 sits within the broader Transport category and carries the full creative and strategic weight of SAS's brand platform for that year.
In Denmark, and across the Scandinavian markets SAS serves, the campaign set out to demonstrate that travelers return richer — not in the material sense, but in terms of perspective, courage, inspiration, and love. Annelie Nässén, SAS Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, articulated the brief directly, according to sasgroup.net: 'Travel changes us, and when it changes us, we change the world.' That philosophical proposition, translated into covertly observed human moments at the arrivals gate, gave the campaign an authenticity that distinguishes it sharply from produced lifestyle imagery. The Clapboard Score for 'The Arrivals' is 78 out of 100, reflecting strong creative craft and exceptional organic distribution performance.
SAS built 'The Arrivals' on a single consumer truth: the arrivals hall is one of the most emotionally concentrated public spaces in any airport. The strategy inverts standard airline advertising logic entirely. Where competitors including Lufthansa and Norwegian Air Shuttle competed heavily on route breadth, punctuality credentials, and price positioning across Scandinavian markets in 2018, SAS chose to own the emotional territory that no ticket price can manufacture — the reunion itself.
The 'We Are Travelers' platform had, since approximately 2014, consistently argued that travel is transformative rather than merely transactional, according to sasgroup.net. By 2018, &Co. pushed that proposition further, shifting the narrative emphasis away from the traveler in motion and toward the moment of return. This is strategically significant because it relocates the airline's value from the journey to what the journey produces in a person — and, crucially, in the people waiting for them. The airport arrivals hall becomes a proof point for the brand's entire philosophical position.
Global air-passenger growth was projected at approximately 3.5 percent annually between 2017 and 2037, according to researchandmarkets.com, indicating that the competitive stakes for brand differentiation in travel were rising. In a market where more than one billion international departures occurred in 2018, according to researchandmarkets.com, winning emotional affinity — rather than merely functional consideration — was a viable long-term brand strategy. SAS's choice to document real, unscripted human emotion rather than construct it positions the airline as a participant in genuine human experience, a stance that advertising from Norwegian Air Shuttle and Lufthansa's brand campaigns of the same period did not meaningfully occupy in the Scandinavian context.
Director Jeppe Rønde led the production of 'The Arrivals' across four days of filming inside Copenhagen Airport's arrivals hall. The production method is both the campaign's most distinctive technical decision and its central creative argument: three specially constructed towers, each fitted with a spyglass, were built inside the terminal to allow the crew to film arriving passengers and waiting family members without subjects being aware of the camera's presence, as documented by onemileatatime.com and adsoftheworld.com.
Rønde is a Danish filmmaker whose documentary sensibility is directly legible in the finished work. The decision to use a spyglass rather than a standard lens setup is not merely logistical — it is conceptual. The image produced carries an inherent quality of witness rather than performance. Faces, gestures, and embraces observed through the spyglass read as discovered rather than staged, which is the precise emotional register the campaign required to support SAS's claim that its travelers return authentically changed. Production was handled by Bacon, the Copenhagen-based production company, which brought the technical infrastructure necessary to sustain four days of covert observation in a busy international terminal.
Art director Rune Petersen and copywriter Johan Køhler at &Co. shaped the creative framework around which Rønde's footage operates. Photographer Peter Funch contributed to the visual identity of the wider campaign, as noted by adsoftheworld.com and onemileatatime.com. Account direction was led by Morten Fabricius, with account management shared by Camilla Reinholdt and colleagues, according to clapboard.com. The assembled team's collective discipline — restraint in construction, precision in observation — is what allows the film to carry the weight of a brand platform argument without a single line of explanatory dialogue undermining the images themselves.
'The Arrivals' generated more than 40 million views, according to clapboard.com. That figure is remarkable for a single-asset brand film released in October 2018 from a Scandinavian airline operating primarily in Denmark and the Nordic region. The distribution pattern is equally revealing: 74 percent of those views came from organic reach on Facebook, according to clapboard.com, indicating that the film earned its audience through social sharing rather than paid amplification alone.
The campaign achieved more than 1.1 million social reactions and 250,000 Facebook shares, according to clapboard.com and andco.dk. These numbers reflect genuine audience investment — sharing at that scale requires a viewer to stake their own social identity on the content, which the film's emotional register clearly supported. The campaign's industry recognition followed the performance data: 'The Arrivals' received three Effie Awards in 2019, according to sasgroup.net, affirming its effectiveness as a brand communication, and two Lovie Awards in 2019, according to clapboard.com, recognising its creative standard in European digital work. No awards were confirmed at Cannes Lions, The One Show, D&AD, or the Clio Awards.
No verified box-office or direct revenue attribution data for 'The Arrivals' is publicly available. Structurally, however, the campaign demonstrates that a single, craft-led film built around observable human truth — distributed on social platforms where organic sharing is the primary amplification mechanism — can achieve reach and engagement normally associated with campaigns of far greater media investment. For SAS, operating in the competitive Scandinavian travel market against Norwegian Air Shuttle and Lufthansa, that earned media efficiency represents a meaningful strategic return on the creative decision to observe rather than produce.
'The Arrivals' is a 2018 brand film created for SAS by Danish agency &Co., filmed covertly inside Copenhagen Airport's arrivals hall using three spyglass towers. Released October 30, 2018, the film is part of SAS's 'We Are Travelers' platform and argues that travel returns people emotionally richer than when they departed, according to sasgroup.net.
'The Arrivals' generated more than 40 million views, according to clapboard.com. Seventy-four percent of those views came from organic reach on Facebook, according to clapboard.com, demonstrating that the film's emotional resonance drove significant audience sharing without reliance on paid media distribution alone.
Danish filmmaker Jeppe Rønde directed 'The Arrivals' for SAS. Production was handled by Bacon, a Copenhagen-based production company, across four days of filming in Copenhagen Airport's arrivals hall, as documented by onemileatatime.com and adsoftheworld.com. Art direction was led by Rune Petersen and copywriting by Johan Køhler at &Co.
'The Arrivals' received three Effie Awards in 2019, according to sasgroup.net, and two Lovie Awards in 2019, according to clapboard.com. No awards were confirmed at Cannes Lions, The One Show, D&AD, or the Clio Awards. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 78 out of 100.
The production team built three specially constructed towers fitted with spyglasses inside Copenhagen Airport's arrivals hall, allowing four days of covert filming of genuine passenger reunions, as documented by onemileatatime.com. The technique ensured subjects remained unaware of the camera, producing footage with documentary authenticity rather than the staged quality of conventional airline advertising.
'The Arrivals' is the seventh campaign under SAS's 'We Are Travelers' platform, which ran from approximately 2014 to 2022, according to sasgroup.net. It was the first film in the platform led by &Co. The platform's consistent argument — that travel transforms people — reached its most emotionally direct expression in this 2018 Denmark campaign, according to andco.dk.
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