When we last checked in on Air New Zealand, the company’s promo team was trying to make the most of its country’s reputation as The Hobbit’s home base. Known more for its zany videos than anything relating to travel, ANZ is now hyping a contest whose winners will go on a “blind date” all the way from London to Los Angeles.

The purpose of the campaign is to highlight one of the airline’s standout features: New Zealand is currently the only company to offer a “romantic seating option” in the form of a three-seat “sky couch” that folds into a bed for two. Here’s the kicker: they call the experience “cuddle class”. Eww.

Interested parties will gather on Valentine’s Day at London’s Heathrow with passports and luggage–but only two couples, one straight and one gay, will win tickets/weekend hotel fares for LA. We’re not sure how the losers will deal with it, but we hope they live fairly close to the airport because that’s a lot of work for no payoff. Also: the lucky winners will be filmed throughout the 12-plus hour flight that will mark the beginning of their pseudo-relationships. We can only hope that one of these fortunate four has the acting chops to be featured on the next season of Survivor or The Bachelor. Why else would someone living in London want to visit LA in the first place?

We kinda like this campaign–and we have to admire a company with the chutzpah to cast Lindsay Lohan in anything filmed after, say, 2005. But we’re still skeptical, because we know how quickly things can go wrong between two people stuck together on an airplane:

We’d like to highlight a piece about the nation of New Zealand’s decision to hang all its PR/tourism hopes on Peter Jackson’s upcoming Hobbit trilogy. We can certainly understand the logic behind this BFF relationship: As our friends at AgencySpy put it last week, “when you account for tourism dollars, the LOTR trilogy basically single-handedly boosted New Zealand’s entire economy”. As the managing director of Hobbiton tours puts it, “We are a small country and that brand awareness, how do you buy that? That’s what a movie does.”

But while we’re at it, we’d really like to review Air New Zealand’s incredible PR campaign: Middle Earth characters already dominate the Auckland airport, and we saw both of these videos for the first time today. First is a clip of the airline’s new Hobbit plane (though we can’t see anything special about it beyond the awesome paint job):

Here’s the real gem, though: a truly excellent in-flight safety video for all Air NZ travelers complete with “Elvish” codes allowing viewers to enter to win a free trip to the film’s New Zealand premier.

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Air New Zealand, which is now known for its videos as much as anything airline-related, has launched a new set of clips starring Mason & Jason, a pair of conjoined sheep. The sheep twins are actually introducing the Economy Skycouch, a new way to fly coach with more room to stretch out.

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Bedazzled fitness guru Richard Simmons is Air New Zealand’s newest safety ambassador, giving that airlines’ travelers the scoop on in-flight safety with a few low-impact aerobic moves thrown in. Also in the video, Phil Keoghan, host of The Amazing Race, and Rob Fyfe, the airline’s CEO. (He’s wearing pink shorts and a purple headband. A little more help here.)

The video, called “Fit to Fly,” hopes to follow in the viral success of the airline’s previous safety videos, like “The Bare Essentials of Safety from Air New Zealand,” which has gotten nearly six million YouTube views to date.

Air New Zealand’s creative agency in New Zealand, .99, developed the video; CRT/tanaka is the airline’s U.S. PR firm.