What happens when a budget British travel company takes the internet by storm?
TikTok has made Jet2 an international phenomenon... despite the company only operating in the UK.
In contrast with last year’s chart-busting roster of hits, the sound of summer 2025 for millions hasn’t come from an emerging artist or a music legend, nor is it even really a song.
Over the past few months, social media has teemed with videos featuring a sound bite from a TV ad for a UK-based package vacation operator. In the ad, a British voice, speaking over a decade-old pop track, announces: “Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday.”
Big break
The clip has now been used in over 2.2 million videos on TikTok, where users have mostly employed the upbeat marketing promotion ironically, highlighting their vacation nightmares and mishaps including underwhelming hotel room vistas (~291 million views) and injurious fishing trips (~324 million views).
As these videos started to take off around the globe, swaths of Americans rushed to look up what Jet2, which only operates from 13 bases in the UK, actually is. Indeed, while travel-hungry Brits search for the company every summer, Google queries for “jet2” increased more than fivefold in the US from June to August this year.
As the likes of Jeff Goldblum and Mariah Carey have jumped on the trend — on top of the sound featuring in a controversial post from the White House — the company has been firmly cemented in the internet’s (and therefore the world’s) vernacular, with the #jet2 TikTok tag amassing more than 87,000 mentions. But is associating its brand with a viral meme good for Jet2’s business?
Package deal
Jet2’s origins trace back to 1971, when its parent company, Dart Group, operated a freight service transporting flowers out of Guernsey. Around three decades of deliveries later, Dart Group launched Jet2.com as a commercial passenger airline, before rebranding the entire group as Jet2 plc in 2020.
Today, Jet2 is the UK’s third-largest airline — and, in its most recent annual report on Monday, the company outlined that it had flown ~19.8 million passengers in fiscal year 2025, up 11% year over year, and accrued almost 7.2 billion pounds in revenue (up 15%).
Whether the online viral buzz will translate meaningfully to the company’s bottom line is still up in the air for now. However, Jet2’s stock saw a large bump at the end of April, after the company doubled down on its full-year guidance, announced a share buyback of 250 million pounds, and launched the #Jet2Challenge on TikTok, inviting users to participate in the trend for a cash prize. So far this year, Jet2’s gains have largely outpaced rivals EasyJet and TUI, having recovered from a pandemic slump and the difficult landscape for UK package holiday providers in the late 2010s.
As Bloomberg outlined in October, Jet2 has benefited from young people looking to package holiday deals as a cheap, straightforward option in recent years… though the same article highlighted the company’s reliance on UK customers as a “potential weak spot.” Still, after an accidentally world-renowned ad campaign, families of four everywhere now know where they can get 200 pounds’ worth of holiday savings.
