Breeze’s Sky-High Fortune Giveaway: How OpenFortune Launched First-Class Recall & Engagement

Rhode Island-based Breeze Airways wants you to feel on vacation the moment you step onto their planes.

As Providence’s hometown carrier, they focus on providing bespoke nonstop routes to high-demand vacation destinations across the U.S.

For them, the difference is in the details big and small: Great customer service, minimized need for connections, and de-inflated prices compared to competitors. All to eliminate the friction – and high price tags – that can come with entering vacation mode. 

As Breeze’s Founder & CEO David Neeleman shares:

But even with a strong regional presence and competitive fares, awareness is everything. Customers weigh route convenience, flight times, pricing, and other variables when choosing transportation, often favoring larger, more recognizable airlines.

So when Breeze needed lift off promoting its nonstop offerings from T.F. Green International Airport, they aimed for something fun and fresh — the possibility of travel right inside a fortune.

Familiarity can be a challenge for regional brands, especially when measurable community engagement and digital amplification are the real destinations. Plus, airport and travel marketing tends to look the same. Same digital boards, same airport signage, same ad-heavy wall panels pummeling busy travelers.

Instead, Breeze set their creative sights higher:

• Create and grow excitement around flying with Breeze.

• Deepen engagement with core Providence-based audiences.

• *And* expand brand awareness beyond Providence networks for great familiarity and recall.

To achieve this, Breeze needed a marketing flight manual that felt community-written. Something driving tangible reach and resonance, and most importantly, using a high-intent strategy over forgettable high volume.

That’s where the idea struck: Breeze would turn desserts into departures.

Breeze, Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport, and OpenFortune launched an eight-week sweepstakes distributed through participating Chinese restaurants across Providence.

The marketing route was elegantly simple:

• Fortune front slips: Snappy sayings around travel, exploration, and “new horizons.”

• Fortune back slips: Contextual copy promoting the central sweepstakes, and anchored with a QR code to make entering easy breezy.

To make things even sweeter, Breeze decided everyone – yes, everyone – who scanned and entered the giveaway would walk away winning something. Prizes included:

• Instant airport promo codes for every participant.

• Weekly giveaways of (2) round-trip tickets to popular vacation spots like Orlanda, Los Angeles, Fort Meyers, Myrtle Beach, and more

• (5) weekly winners receiving $50 + in BreezePoints

And of course, the grand giveaway: (2) winners received a three-night, all-expenses-paid vacation package to their choice of beach getaway in Vero Beach, FL, or Myrtle Beach, SC – including flights, hotel, and rental cars.

Would it have been easier to simply shout about cheap flights to great spots? Sure.

But Breeze wanted to go the extra mile, transforming a quiet, anticipated dining ritual like opening takeout fortune cookies into a true celebration. With fortune cookies already encompassing that surprise and fun, Breeze simply gave it a bigger runway.

No turbulence here, folks! Breeze’s fortune cookie-fueled sweepstakes drove measurable consumer impact in key areas for the airline:

• 72% unaided brand recall

• 18% searched Breeze after opening their fortunes

More importantly, this campaign demonstrated something better: How physical, shared moments will always outperform passive exposure. A traveler might see dozens of tourism industry and airline ads in a single week. But how many get opened at a dinner table, read aloud, passed around, and drive people to action?

Fortune cookies create that pause. They play on those small sparks of possibility behind every booked trip.

And in Breeze’s case especially, those sparks led directly to flight searches and measurable organic engagement, on and off the screen. As Rhode Island Airport Corporation President & CEO Iftikhar Ahmad put it best:

Breeze’s (tasty) sweepstakes had a clear takeaway onboard: Find ways to insert your name into moments people already anticipate and enjoy and your messages won’t feel like marketing.

Who knew the best route from Providence to paradise started with a cookie?