Charity looks to the skies with FlightStore

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International charity Amnesty and FlightStore, the provider of online retail services, announced this week the launch of the world's first cause-related inflight store. The Amnesty International shop will initially go live on Lauda Air flights between Vienna and Sydney and Melbourne via Kuala Lumpur from 1 April, and will allow passengers to donate money from their seats through an aircraft's inflight entertainment system, by using their credit cards.

FlightStore, which builds inflight interactive shopping malls for retailers such as CD WOW!, Lindt, Bol, Berry Brothers and Rudd, The Gadget Shop and Molton Brown, said it has been in discussions with Amnesty for several months to develop the new channel.

The Amnesty International website will encourage travellers on Lauda flights to make donations through its hard-hitting campaign featuring a household iron and the slogan: "If you don't want to imagine what it's like to be tortured, then look away now."

FlightStore marketing director Charles Vine commented: "We're delighted that our technology can now be applied to good causes. Our preliminary research indicates that passengers welcome the initiative and that airlines also benefit from being aligned to the global ethical causes highlighted through charities like Amnesty. Our hope is that passenger experience will be enhanced through expanding the portfolio of interactive stores available to them while they fly."

FlightStore said it is also developing a new approach to duty-free shopping whereby the passenger makes an order onboard but the order is then emailed forward to the destination by satellite where fulfilment takes place and the passenger picks up the item on the luggage carousel.

• UK start-up company, FlightStore, was established in March 2000 by a team of ex-airline executives, who built a system bringing retail shopping websites to passengers using proprietary software runing on the interactive seatback TVs on long-haul aircraft.