Joon Is Offering A Service I Doubt Anyone Ever Asked For

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Joon is an embodiment of a lot that is wrong with modern-day culture – it’s an airline attempting to pander to Millennials while only succeeding in appearing patronising and vapid.

In truth the attempt to pander to Millennials is really only just a cover for Air France (the owner of Joon) to create a new group of lowly paid flight crew while carefully navigating its way around the unions and French labor laws….not that Air france would ever admit that of course.

Anyway….

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything particularly pointless come out of Joon so it’s not all that surprising that, yesterday, the airline broke its silence when it launched a new tool called “Paperplane”.

Joon’s press release defined the new tool as “the travel pool to offer someone a holiday” and described it like this:

“With Paperplane, you can offer an exceptional, surprising and personalized gift in just three clicks:

• You and your friends pool money together via a link that you send them after creating the kitty. Everyone decides on the amount they want to give and can leave a personalized message for the recipient.
• When the time comes, you won’t arrive empty handed, you give your friend a paper plane with your printed personal messages, without having to spend time chasing signatures all night long.
• Your friends have a year to choose their travel dates and the destination of their dreams operated by Joon on departure from metropolitan France. Eat pizzas in Naples, go diving in the Seychelles, or discover the country of “Futebol” in Brazil, there’s a world of opportunities and they are sure to find their dream destination.”

Essentially it would appear that Joon has created a way for a group of people to offer “someone” a vacation that has to be taken on Joon (which limits the destinations considerably) and within a period set by the airline.

Apparently if not all of the money collected is used up on the airfare the recipient can blow the rest of it on one or more of “Joon’s many options,such as choosing a specific seat, adding checked baggage, enjoying a meal on board, or making another trip with Joon.”

Why would anyone do this?

If a group of people genuinely wishes to send someone on a great vacation why wouldn’t they just collect the cash from everyone involved and hand that cash over to the lucky recipient (possibly as a group at a pre-planned night out) while explaining to them what it’s for?

That person then gets to choose their vacation destination from the whole of planet Earth, he/she can choose what airline to fly and what cabin of service to book and there’s no time restriction on the vacation either.

Isn’t that a considerably better gift? What am I missing? Would any of you take Joon up on this idea?

Featured image courtesy of Wiki Commons Media