See Star Trek Invade Heathrow Airport To Promote Paramount+ On British Airways

Unsuspecting travelers at London’s Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 recently got a surprise seeing a number of Star Trek characters making their way through departures. We have photos, videos, and details on this bit of stunt marketing from British Airways.

Beaming up with BA

British Airways customers can now watch Paramount+ on long-haul flights. To spread the message, BA brought Star Trek to Heathrow Airport where a cadre of Starfleet officers along with a couple of Vulcans made their way through the airport to board “U.S.S. Enterprise Flight 1701 to Starbase 1.” Stunned travelers were seen taking photos and assisting the visitors from the final frontier seeking directions to their boarding gate.

Check out the scene in this video…

BA brought the real thing to London

The authentic Starfleet costumes from Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds were carefully flown in direct from set, with the lucky costume wearers made up of the airline’s Star Trek-loving colleagues. The Star Trek franchise’s costume designer, Bernadette Greaney, styled five colleagues in unique lieutenant uniforms from Command, Operations and Sciences, with two transformed into Vulcans by Star Trek’s prosthetics team and dressed in the state-of-the-art Vulcan robes. They also had genuine props, including Tribbles, Federation passports and an original Tricorder.

(British Airways)

“We wanted to kick off this announcement with Paramount+ in true blockbuster-style by bringing some of their exclusive content to life, directly to our home at Heathrow Terminal 5. It was great to see so many Star Trek fans from across the business come together to help us celebrate this launch, with many colleagues excited to swap their wings for the Starfleet Insignia for a day,” said BA Chief Customer Officer Calum Laming in a statement.

(British Airways)

The stunt was done to celebrate the launch of a dedicated Paramount+ channel on the Highlife entertainment platform, which will allow British Airways’ customers to watch from the comfort of their seat when traveling on any long-haul flight in every cabin. Customers will be able to watch a curation of exclusive Paramount+ series targeting all ages on the airline’s Highlife entertainment platform, including HALO, The Offer, Queen of the Universe, Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years, iCarly, Yellowstone and the Star Trek series.

(British Airways)

Customers who wish to continue watching after their flight can do so by subscribing Paramount+ via a QR code or on ParamountPlus.com. Members of the British Airways’ Executive Club are being offered a one-month free exclusive subscription offer.

(British Airways)

Paramount+ launched in the UK & Ireland in June 2022.

 

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Nice… The circles on the ceiling resemble a transporter platform. I thought this was on set :-)

So creative! Makes me long for the days of Star Trek The Experience

So awesome. Would love to become a Vulcan.

🖖🏽

OMG that was AWESOME! It’s too bad nothing that awesome would ever be allowed to happen in the US airports :(

Except that the two London airports had huge issues with workers not showing up for much of the summer this year due to low pay and poor working conditions, causing massive amounts of flight cancellations for BA and other airlines, and causing many people to be delayed in getting home or having to cancel vacations.

I’ll take SFO, LAX or JFK any day over those London airports. No Star Trek, but they get you where you want to go. :-)

The reason wasn’t down to poor pay or working conditions. It was down to a loss of workers to other industries through Covid which left a gap in the talent pool.

Hmm…

Workers invited by the union Unite to speak to the FT at its Heathrow office said many people no longer saw the airport as a place to build a career. “The work is the same, but the way they do it is different,” said a cleaner who had been transferred from one outsourcing company to another over a 30-year period. Teams deployed to clean passenger jets were often under-strength, and turnround times were shorter, she added. Hourly pay just £1 above the minimum wage was not enough to stop people quitting.

“Heathrow was something to aim for in the past. Now, it is not something to aim for,” said a second Heathrow engineer, who claimed there was an “abundance” of jobs locally paying up to £10,000 a year more — working on the High Speed 2 rail line, in data centres or for Amazon. He added he and many colleagues were about to see a permanent pay cut imposed during the pandemic kick in, while managers’ salaries had been restored following a temporary reduction. 

Schiphol Amsterdam was pretty bad in April and continue to get worse throughout the summer. Missed my flight home due to the strike, King’s Holiday and the staff shortage.

Well I hope the public was more than nonPlussed. Them Brits must’ve seen those wonky uniforms with the uneven jacket and vertical black stripe and thought they were passing a New Wave band on their way to a revival tour gig I reckon.

Lol true, modern uniforms are… Not good

The British might have looked at the asymmetric design of the uniforms and thought they were edgy and cool.

Americans seem the most offended by that sort of thing.

I think they’re great.

Lucky fans! This is really cool

This was great. But they totally violated the temporal prime directive!

☝️😉

Just as long as they have more than two exits from spacedock.

Replicators that actually provide real Singapore slings would be nice, too! #FlySQ

The costumes look fantastic! Almost exactly like on-screen, tailored perfectly to the actors. Well done!

Awesome

Paramount did something like this in 1979. They had volunteers wear the actual STTMP costumes while walking around the San Diego Zoo. What’s old is new again.

I love how many people flashed the Vulcan salute at the actors!

Cool stunt,shame it’s for the worst airline ever! At least their customer socalled service. The cabin crew are nice though. I stopped flying with this crappy airline when they screwed up my travel from New York to Oslo more than four years ago and left me stranded at Heathrow for twelve hours. NOT happy! And being lied to and being pushed back several times on flgihts they SAID I was on. No thanks, I stopped flying with them more than four years ago,and STILL waiting for them to resolve my case! Yes,I do send a reminder every now and then,just asking how long it’s gonna take. They probably think it’s resolved. Guess they don’t need my business. I travel a lot and used to love BA,but give me AA,SAS,UA,AA any day over this crummy airline. Yes,I have a new name for it,but it’s not appropriate here. lol

That sounds awful. And BA has joined the ranks of the airlines that nickel and dime everything including being able to choose your seat.

Alitalia did worse than that to me. They let me board a flight from Venice to Rome before traveling home to NYC, knowing that their staff at the airports were about to strike. Lo and behold, we get to Marco Polo International and it’s absolute chaos. Two people at the counter serving a line of thousands of stranded passengers. We all waited in the queue for over 24 hours, people just sleeping on their bags when they could. Hotels by the airport got booked up immediately and there was too much uncertainty for anyone to feel comfortable leaving the airport without knowing when they could get home. No food or water was provided to elderly customers, either. What a difference it would have made if we’d been told in Venice that this was about to go down. Alitalia is defunct now but was sold to ITA, which I plan to avoid at all costs.

All British Airways ever did to me was rip one of my checked bags to shreds and pay me off. I’d gladly take that again over being stranded in the airport. ;)

Gee,that sounds really bad! Your last comment was funny though,and I’d happily take that too,lol.

You’ve never flown Egyptair, 1990s-era Aeroflot, Tatarstan Airlines, etc.!

BA is not remotely the best, not remotely the worst.

Pssst…somebody should tell the Starlet Tailor that the bottoms of the uniforms are uneven. Embarrassing to let them go out like that. ;)

Whoops. Starfleet, not Starlet. Stupid autocorrect.

Can they put them to work at the security gate to reduce the wait times right now?

Such a fun commercial, tho those tribbles should def be seized by customs!

Do they count as pets or food?

Great stuff!