Follow your Nose to Five Countries, All from Heathrow T2
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- Photo: Heathrow Airport
The feeling when you’ve returned home from a holiday, open your suitcase and begin to unpack, inhaling the smells from your trip, caught in clothes and reignited in your memory. The aromas of flora and fauna mingled with cuisine and smoke from a campfire are inexplicable and for a moment you’re taken right back to a few days prior when you had sand between your toes.
As we explored in The Content Issue, scent is a powerful sense, used by brands to enhance a customer experience or create an association to cleanliness or quality. Heathrow Airport is using the power of smells to take passengers on a sensory journey before they’ve left the ground. The Scent Globe was introduced in Terminal 2 last month, allowing travelers to enjoy Thailand, South Africa, Japan, China and Brazil through their noses – creating a new experience or awakening a past memory.
Laura Greene, PR manager for Heathrow Airport explains, “We know that smell and memory are intrinsically linked and that scent is an important part of exploring a new country. We developed our scent globe to bring the powerful association of smell and travel to the airport experience. This globe has been a great way of reminding our passengers of some of the unique destinations that only Heathrow can connect them to.”
The Globe was designed by Design In Scent, experts in crafting exceptional scent experiences. Gemma Hopkins, Director at Design In Scent, developed Heathrow’s Scent Globe: “Our sense of smell is directly linked to the brain’s limbic system, a part of the brain so closely associated with memory and feelings it’s sometimes called our ’emotional brain.’ When we first smell a new scent, our brain forges an association between the scent and whatever it is that we are experiencing at the time, be it a place, a person, or even a moment. When we encounter the smell again, the link is already there, ready to elicit a memory or a mood and fire our imaginations.”
“The goal behind the installation was to stir memories and create excitement for travel, which is just what it did. It provided a fun way to interact.”
For the price of one plane ticket you can begin creating memories in five different countries, all before you’ve boarded the plane.