A funny fact about Austria is popular on the Internet: tourists supposedly confuse this country with Australia so often that an information desk had to be installed at one of the airports to help unlucky passengers. We decided to check whether such reports are true.
They write about a stand or information board with an SOS button designed to help those who flew to Salzburg by mistake, expecting to be on the other side of the world informational, entertaining And educational portals. Users of social networks share this information (Facebook*, "VKontakte", X, Telegram) and blogging platforms (“Zen", "Peekaboo", LiveJournal). Some claimthat the counter is located not in Salzburg, but in Vienna.
Many posts about the help desk for lost tourists are accompanied by a photo of a poster with a large inscription in English: “Sorry, this is Austria, not Australia. Need help? Please press the button." To the right of the inscription there is a large SOS button, but it’s hardly possible to press it - it’s just a picture on a poster. On the Internet you can find several photos of this banner from different angles, so there is no doubt that it exists (or at least existed). In some photos, luggage belts can be seen under the poster.
However, if you study the poster a little more carefully, it becomes clear that it has nothing to do with airport services. In smaller font it says: “Commend provides security and communication. From Salzburg to the rest of the world. Even in the most incredible situations." The website address is also indicated - www.commend.com. Judging by the information presented there, the Commend company (which is what the poster advertises) has nothing to do with travel. It develops security and communication systems used for security, monitoring, access control, and including emergency calls for help, which is demonstrated on the banner.
Representatives of Salzburg Airport on their official Facebook account also stated, that there had never been any help desk for those traveling to Australia - it was just a “brilliant advertising idea” by Commend. And in comments For the fact-checking project Lead Stories, they noted that no one confuses flights to Austria and to Australia, so such a stand with an SOS button would be simply useless. And, judging by the wording about “incredible situations” on the poster, tourists who end up in Austria by mistake are not at all a common occurrence.
Commend representative Wolfgang Per confirmed USA Today that such an advertising poster appeared at the Salzburg airport in 2009, in 2018 its design was updated, and in 2022, when advertising banners at the airport were replaced with digital screens, it was removed.
However, confusion with the names of the two countries still sometimes occurs. Thus, in 2018, one of the Australian users of the blogging platform Reddit shared a photograph of a parcel that was delivered two months later than expected. There were five stamps on the package: “Wrongly sent to Austria”; next to one of them, “again” was added by hand—presumably by a postal employee—and underlined several times. Some commentators have noted the fact that the Austrian postal service even has special stamps for such cases, meaning this appears to be not an isolated incident.
Thus, there is no assistance desk for passengers boarding a plane to Austria instead of Australia at Salzburg airport. But for quite a long time a creative advertising banner from the Commend company hung there, which became truly viral. In 2023, more than ten years after the poster appeared at the airport, its photo - with the address of the company's website - continues to circulate on the Internet.
Cover photo: Facebook Commend International
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Read on the topic:
- ABC News. No kangaroos in Austria, so why do so many people still confuse it with Australia?
- Is it true that each Olympic ring corresponds to a certain part of the world?
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