Airports are some of the busiest places in the world, crowded with people from different backgrounds. But because of language barriers, passengers tend not to make human connections while waiting for their flights.

We created ‘Connecting Seats’: 2 seats that translate every language in real time, allowing travellers with different languages to talk to each other. With this experience, we set out to bring random travellers together during the Christmas season.

The Seats yielded some warm and emotional chats, in which people exchanged views on the world and holiday greetings. Travellers from over 30 countries put their phones or books aside and opened up to each other. The best moments were turned into a social video.

The Connecting Seats > The seats were designed to rest your head in the centre, with speakers on each side. A directional microphone facilitated the audio connection. The Connecting Seats used Google’s Cloud Speech, Translation and Web Speech APIs to translate every language, including multiple dialects.

Social content > Because of KLM’s ambition to reach as many people as possible worldwide, we decided to focus on a social video of the experience that people would love to share. We sent a press release to media that focus on digital trends and seeded the video on Facebook, Instagram, WeChat and Twitter.

We concentrated all our efforts in a single week around Christmas.

• 20+ million views.

• Number of shares and comments above benchmark with 110,000+.

• 95% positive response on social media.

• Emotional connection on social video scored well above benchmark.

• Global media coverage by authoritative media such as Trendwatching.com, PSFK, Yahoo! plus shared by Google Europe on its social channels.

• Amongst the 10% best scoring KLM content