thinksomething

A letter to Vilnius

Today I received an e-mail from the Ambassador Programme for Vilnius European Capital of Culture 2009 offering me a 10% discount for flights with FlyLAL (Lithuanian Airlines). It's a nice offer despite it being purely an advertising campaign for the airline, but not very practical at all. I decided to let the organisers know how I felt about it. I replied to the e-mail I received to the address info@culturelive.lt and it bounced back. Later I tried the address given on the official website (info@vilnius2009.lt) and it bounced back again. It doesn't give a good impression of the event at all. Anyway, here's what I wrote to them:

Dear all

I just want to raise a small point about the little piece of advertising you sent me.

I live in the North of England close to Manchester and Liverpool airport. Flylal will be beginning a Manchester-Vilnius route (via Amsterdam) next year. These tickets cost £400 (£360 when I get the discount). Extremely expensive and out of the question for the type of people you want to attract to Vilnius European Capital of Culture. Moreover, the route via Amsterdam is simply inconvenient.

My proposal to you is to advertise convenient and affordable ways to get to Vilnius from the North of England and Scotland. Such a route would be Liverpool-Kaunas which I regularly take with Ryanair. However, as I discussed in my blog, people have trouble pin pointing Vilnius on a map nevermind Kaunas! Plus, transport connections between Vilnius and Kaunas are not great from the airport.

I hope you can understand where I'm coming from on this. I'm simply very enthusiatic about Lithuania and Vilnius and want the year of culture to be as successful as possible.

Regards

Anna Ward

Created: 2008-05-27 17:19, Tags: Capital of Culture, Lithuania, Vilnius