AirAsia Partners The Oakland Raiders NFL Team

AirAsia has become an official sponsor of the Oakland Raiders, three-time National Football League (NFL) Super Bowl champions.

To celebrate the partnership, AirAsia is launching a 1,000 free seats online contest in which one hundred students will be chosen at random for the opportunity to win one free ticket to a Raiders home game.

AirAsia Group CEO Dato’ Sri Tony Fernandes said, “This is a very meaningful moment for all of us in AirAsia. We are very excited to associate ourselves with a great, iconic team like the Oakland Raiders as they reflect our own endeavor for excellence. This is actually the latest step we are taking, to boost our brand globally. Despite not operating into the US yet, AirAsia has already captured the attention of the US public and Aviation Week’s Laureate Award that we won recently is a testimony of that.”

Fernandes made history by being the first Asian to be recognized with the Laureate Award for the Commercial Air Transport category in March 2009, alongside other Laureate winners Alan S. Boyd, the first U.S. Transportation secretary, and the U.S. Coast Guard HH-60 Jayhawk, HH-65 Dolphin, HC-130 Hercules rescue teams.

Last week, the low cost airline unveiled the Oakland Raiders aircraft livery. The livery is donned by AirAsia X’s latest Airbus A340 aircraft, dubbed ‘Xcellence’, matching the Oakland Raiders’ motto which is ‘Commitment to Excellence’.

AirAsia X CEO, Azran Osman-Rani said, “We're extremely proud to dedicate one of our A340s to the iconic Oakland Raiders brand. This trans-continental aircraft that plies our London-KL route symbolizes our ambition to open up the North American market as our future growth area. We'll be flying this aircraft into Oakland at the start of this coming NFL season, and I'm sure that the groundbreaking livery design will capture the imagination of millions of NFL fans and introduce them to our proud AirAsia brand and Malaysian heritage.”

AirAsia X is the low cost long-haul affiliate of low cost short-haul AirAsia, and one of the very first Asian sponsors of an NFL team.

“We are absolutely thrilled with our new relationship with AirAsia,” said Oakland Raiders Chief Executive Amy Trask. “It is a unique and audacious relationship between two truly global organizations. As always, we eagerly seek creative opportunities to serve and interact with our fans throughout the world and we are delighted to work with AirAsia on this creative endeavor.”

The Oakland Raiders are a professional American football team formed in 1960, currently based in the city of Oakland, California. Their home ground is the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. They currently play in the Western Division of the American Football Conference (AFC) in the National Football League (NFL).

In total, the Raiders have won 3 Super Bowl titles, the last of which was Super Bowl XVIII in 1984.

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