Rosapark: Let your nose guide you on your travels

French train company, Thalys, encourages travellers to discover city destinations that are far from the clichés and well off the beaten path.

That’s not in travel advertising. How Thalys does so is.

In 2015, Thalys and its agency, Rosapark, gave people a taste of these destinations with its acoustic experience, Sounds of the City, that let people hear the sounds of exciting destinations.

Now Rosapark has gone one better. Scents of the City lets people explore places through their smells. Scent has a remarkable ability to create emotions, memories and desire in people.

Rosapark created a unique pop-up travel agency in Paris across the weekend May 12-14, promoting travel in four cities – Paris, Amsterdam, Cologne and Brussels. The installation was filled with 752 tubes. And in each tube was a specific scent, like A Real French Breakfast (the the aroma of a buttered tartine in a Parisian café), Latexx (the latex odour from the Sex Museum in Amsterdam) or Moments After Mass (the blend of scents in the Cologne cathedral).

The colour-coded tubes were hung from the ceiling so that visitors could wander through the agency, find the scents that appealed and then locate their origins on wall maps.

The scents were specially created in collaboration with Drom Fragrances and perfume consultant, Elisabeth Carre.

The installation was used to support a larger communication campaign, which began with the the installation in Paris earlier this year, and now continues online and on the big screen in film, that explores the neighbourhoods and histories of what’s behind the scents through the journey of a curious adventurer.

The film is running run in theatres in French, Belgian, Dutch and German cities, as well as online, and on the brand’s new Facebook page from May 16.^.