Scents of the City: First Smell-Based Travel Agent

From the smell of freshly-baked baguettes at a Parisian boulangerie to the smell of...let's say latex at the Amsterdam Sex Museum, scent can be one of our biggest sources of pleasure while travelling. Rosapark tap into this with Scents of the City, 752 scent tubes in an installation created to remind smellers of destinations across Thalys' train routes.

As installed in a Brussels art gallery, the agency had 4 groups of 16 unique fragrances created, conjuring up European cities Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Cologne. According to Rosapark, scents included "A Real French Breakfast", the aroma of a buttered tartine in a Parisian café, “Latexxx”, the latex odor from the Sex Museum in Amsterdam, or the more poetic “Moments after Mass”, the blended scent of the Cologne cathedral. We'll smell what she's smelling.

This campaign follows on from 2015's Sounds of the City, which saw Rosapark installing playable billboards passersby could plug headphone jacks into and hear recorded sounds from across Europe [case study film below]. Following Sounds and Scents of the City, we can't wait to see what the agency comes up with next: Sight, Sensations and Tastes of the City, obviously, and perhaps even Sixth Sense of the City, in which (spoiler alert for one of the best-known twists of all time) Bruce Willis is dead across 14 European cities.

Scents of the City will also be accompanied by a film produced by Birth featuring a man exploring Europe by smell due to aired late-March across four countries.