Shareables: An in-flight gift system

Shareables is a service concept in which flight attendants collect and distribute personalized gifts for air passengers. The service consists of two parts. The first part entails the collecting and sorting of appropriate gifts by a group of enthusiastic volunteers within the pool of flight attendants. These volunteers buy gifts that they find appropriate for the collection, in their spare time at home or while at a destination. The gifts are collected in a sharing hub that is located at the crew center of the airline’s headquarters, which every flight attendant passes through before flying out (Figure 1). They and all other flight attendants can subsequently pick up gifts for their upcoming flight. For the second part of the service, flight attendants take some of the gifts on-board to distribute them during the flight. The goal of the gifts is to positively influence passengers’ emotions and motivations. Since people’s emotions change during a flight, different gifts are appropriate for different people at different times (Figure 2). For example, the mood of a bored passenger may be improved by giving her a puzzle, while a sullen child may receive a bubblewrap sheet that he can ravage to attain a state of pleasant anger (see Table 1 for additional examples). The decisions of both the collection and distribution of gifts is based on the flight attendant’s own expertise and experience with passengers, but also guided by reversal-theory knowledge about motivational states and reversals. Gifts are put in different categories according to the emotional and motivational effect they achieve, for instance, “gifts that reverse people to the telic state,” or “gifts that increase arousal (in the paratelic state).” The idea behind the service concept is that passengers like to receive small surprises and personalized attention during a flight experience that is largely standardized. Similarly, flight attendants want to be able to do something extra for passengers who are having a suboptimal flight experience, and enjoy giving a personal touch to the service they provide.