"Making Travel Easier" was the slogan of a marketing campaign launched in September 1995 by the airline to advertise its revamped SAS Swedish domestic product. This included shuttle flights on the Swedish trunk routes from Stockholm-Arlanda to both Gothenburg and Malmö. Frequency was increased with flights almost every hour, dedicated gates and staff as well as other innovations including ticketless travel with a Travel Pass card, easier telephone bookings and automatic check-in at the 3 airports.
A colourful design was associated with this countrywide campaign and the plan called for no less than 5 MD-80s to be painted with "paper plane" liveries and different background colours. The aircraft were initially specifically assigned on those Swedish routes.
However the advertising agency responsible for the whole project had also introduced a cartoon character for advertisement, the latter being so close to famous Italian cartoon character "La Linea" (The Line) that the campaign disappeared quickly to avoid a lawsuit. Customer response to these bold designs was also not as positive as expected and occurences of business passengers refusing to board the colourful planes were even recorded. As a result only two planes were ever painted and the yellow, purple and green variations planned at first unfortunately never saw the light of day. It is to be noted though, that blue and red were to be the main colours of the 1998 rebranding...
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