When you think of long flights, do you think of sleep? Or of the inability to get any sleep while sitting on a noisy plane? Do you expect to feel fresh and ready when you land? Or do you dread days of toughing it out through jet lag?
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ANA, Japan’s largest airline, knows what the answers to those questions are for too many people. “ANA realizes that many travelers fear long flights due to potential side effects such as jetlag, fatigue or lack of sleep,” Yoshiaki Tsuda, Vice President of the ANA Digital Design Lab, tells us.
So ANA is working on an answer.
The ANA Travel Wellness Initiative is no mere marketing ploy. It’s working with a research team led by Professor Ichiro Kawachi, Chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The ANA–Chan team have been looking at the physical underpinnings of jet lag. They’ve also been looking at people’s beliefs about jet lag.
Now they’re launching initiatives with the goal of helping passengers be at their physical and mental best during flights – and possibly even be in better shape than they were before boarding the flight.
The first initiative will create a mobile app that passengers can use to help them reduce the symptoms of jet lag – or even eliminate jet lag altogether. It’s focusing especially on athletes, who have to land performance-ready.
The app is in trials this year, and ANA aims to make it available to the public in spring 2019.
And after that? If you can get off a plane feeling recharged and ready to go, the sky’s the limit!