Destination Unknown
- Brand
- Schiphol
- Year
- 2014
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Travel & Hospitality
- Mechanic
- Quiz & Trivia
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- FHV BBDO
- With
- Big Orange
- With
- NOT HUMAN
Objective
Schiphol wanted to put its network of 300-plus direct routes front and center for travelers and lift the airport's standing against rivals. Rather than commissioning professional photography of hundreds of cities, the airport turned to real Instagram photos to show those destinations as they actually looked, day to day.
Solution
On schipholdestinationunknown.nl, the player is shown a real photo pulled fresh from Instagram, taken in one of the cities Schiphol flies to directly, and has four minutes to place it on a spinning globe. Local time, flight duration from Schiphol, and the airlines serving the route are all available as hints, but using them costs points. Each correct guess advances the player further and pushes their score up a public leaderboard; the top 50 at the end split a prize of round-trip tickets to any destination in Schiphol's network. The game ran the same way on desktop, tablet, and phone.
Results
Players made almost one million destination guesses. In a post-campaign survey, 90% said they liked the game a lot and 64% said they would have played even without a prize on offer. Airport preference rose from 49% to 60% among people who had merely seen or heard about the game, and to 67% among those who actually played it.
- 1
Players open schipholdestinationunknown.nl (available in English and Dutch) and launch the game from Schiphol's promo screen; it runs on desktop, tablet, and smartphone alike.
- 2
The game shows a freshly pulled Instagram photo taken in one of the cities on Schiphol's route network, matched by a set of hashtags for that destination, and starts a four-minute countdown to answer.
- 3
The player answers by tapping the matching point on a rotating globe.
- 4
Players can open hints — local time, flight duration, and airlines serving the route — but using them lowers the round's score.
- 5
Photos vary in difficulty: some show recognizable landmarks, others are neutral scenes that give away almost nothing.
- 6
A correct guess moves the game to the next photo, drawing from a pool of more than 300 direct destinations.
- 7
At the end of a session, players submit their score to a leaderboard, sign up for the airport's newsletter, or play again; landing in the top 50 enters them into a random prize draw, held after the campaign closes, for a round-trip ticket to a Schiphol destination of their choice.
