A British Columbia man will spend the next 80 days chronicling life at Vancouver International Airport, as he seeks out "stories of true love, lost baggage, furry friends, dangerous goods and gigantic jets."
Jaegar Mah, 29, won a recent contest to become the airport's so-called special correspondent, a job that entails sharing the stories of the passengers and airport staff that he meets in his daily adventures.
His stories will be told on the Live@YVR website, as well as through posts on Facebook and Twitter.
"I'm going to be at the airport for 80 days. I can't leave the airport, I'm eating airport foods, I'm sleeping in the airport," Mah said in a video posted to the Live@YVR website the night before he was due to start his job.
"And we're going to be out there in public capturing everything from fuelling the planes, to helping the planes take off, to eating the best tasting food inside the planes."
On Wednesday, Mah will fly into the airport on a Learjet and will spend his first few hours hobnobbing with members of the public who are encouraged to share story ideas with him.
While Mah will sleep at the Fairmont Vancouver Airport Hotel throughout his stay, he is not allowed to leave the Sea Island airport before November 4.
The self-declared "Anderson Cooper of YVR" gets a daily meal allowance and the use of a camera and editing equipment to put his stories together.
Mah, a Vancouver resident and native of Port Alberni, B.C., competed with dozens of contestants to become the airport's roving reporter and won a spot after garnering more than 4,000 votes from supporters.
The Live@YVR contest that Mah won is similar in concept to other promotions that have been used in recent years to raise the profile of a destination or facility.
In the fall of 2009, tourism officials in Thailand dangled the prospect of free trips to couples who were willing to blog, chat and tweet about their holidays. Another contest in Australia awarded a British man the opportunity to live and work on the Great Barrier Reef for a year.
The Vancouver International Airport is the second-busiest airport in Canada, serving 16.8 million passengers in the last year alone.
