MTFBWY.flights – full web campaign in

In anticipation of the upcoming Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker which will be released 20 December 2019, United Airlines has launched a new Star Wars campaign and one aircraft, tail number N36272, is now part of the alliance.

MTFBWY.flights was constructed in 24 hours using AWS LightSail and a lot of elbow grease. On the underlying web tech, MTFBWY v1 was nodeJS based, while v2 used its own standalone WordPress. Other features was configuring HTTPS and setting up Google Analytics as well as linking to Twitter.

MTFBWY.flights uses N36272 on FlightAware schedule + flight number and cross-reference with the corresponding flight on Priceline.com.

The objective of the POC was to focus on and test commercial viability (less-so technical). The main challenge was that all data collection from FlightAware and deep-linking to the Priceline flight was a manual process. A few intermediary tools helped in converting the FlightAware data into website & eventually Twitter content. Afterwards user acquisition was very slow. Most marketing was Twitter-focused, but subsequent analytics demonstrated that clicks were few and far between.

Overall the POC was a worthwhile learning experience and positive demonstration on how quickly a campaign and/or website can be brought online.