Turkish Airlines Wins Big at The Amenities Awards 2021

Recently the Amenities Awards took place with Turkish Airlines (TA) winning a total of four Gold Awards.

What are The Amenities Awards?

Amenities is a magazine that aims to bring us the best products through the eyes of passengers, designers, and industry experts – thus their Awards Ceremony aptly reflects this aspiration. This year, awards were announced via their magazine, compared to last year where the event was hosted online.

For an airline to be commended by Amenities, they must reflect the three main initiatives: Wellness, Sustainability, and Hygiene. Each airline’s products are reviewed and judged by a panel of experts whereby ‘‘Award categories correspond to the 100-point scoring system and entries are judged on their own individual merits.’’ The awards are as follows:

Platinum – An outstanding product

Gold – An excellent product

Silver – A very accomplished product

Bronze  – A well made straight forward product

Going for Gold

Whilst Bronze was awarded to American Airlines for their hygiene kit, and Silver to JetBlue’s Wanderfuel Amenity Kit, Air France’s Protect Hygiene Kit and COPA Airlines’ Safety Kit, Turkish Airlines (TA) won Gold for four of their amenities.

First, they won Gold for their pledge to Wellness by providing a Wellness app, Meditopia, that reduces stress and anxiety and again for their Play Natural Children’s Kit in collaboration with Adventure Group Ltd which includes a set of wooden toy figures, recyclable cards inside a natural cotton bag. Amenities finding the design ‘‘tactile’’ and ‘‘good for the environment’’.

Second, they won Gold in the Sustainability for their use of sustainable packaging which is certificated as 100 percent biodegradable and compostable – solving nonbiodegradable issues.

Thirdly, TA won Gold in the Hygiene category, a category that is indispensable amid the pandemic. Their hygiene kit features a disposable mask, a disposable bag, antiseptic wipes, and a bottle of sanitizer; whilst Utair and American Airlines scored Platinum for their reusable cloth masks.

Sustainability Issue

Airlines may have lost points, especially in the hygiene and sustainability category, for their inclusion of material that is harmful to the environment such as face masks and gloves which are nonbiodegradable – items which are of frequent and necessary use. It has been reported that face masks end up in landfill sites or worse disposed of in oceans, with a life span of 450 years. But wood used for paper and toys is also a cause for concern. The Sustainability Consortium express that ‘‘Wood processing and toy manufacturing, and the manufacturing of batteries used in powered toys, consume significant amounts of energy, leading to greenhouse gas emissions’’ and that ‘‘Unsustainable Forest management for wood-based product production can result in biodiversity loss, reduced ecosystem quality, and increased greenhouse gas emissions.’’ That it is important to have systems in place to help abate these issues through sourcing, measuring, and monitoring processes and procedures.

In the Amenities magazine, Winter 2020 edition, they addressed the issue of Paper vs Plastic, that paper is the optimum material for sustainability yet towards the end of the article they close with a question: ‘‘What [is] the most sustainable solution?’’, ending in sum with the ‘‘focus should be reducing all single-use packaging’’ and ‘‘collaboration […] is key to accelerating progress towards more sustainable flexible packaging solutions’’, on a par with Sustainability Consortium’s train of thought, and just so I will end in a similar rhetoric – that we should be mindful of the materials we buy into and use, that airlines, if they have not done so already, should look to produce products that are at least reusable such as cloth face masks to achieve the ultimate goal: reducing climate change.

What are your thoughts on the airlines and their respective awards? Let us know in the comments below.