How purple.com became Virgin Atlantic’s WiFi landing page

Captive portals, domains and WiFi at 35,000 ft — a behind-the-scenes overview.

Virgin Atlantic homepage

Purple.com is apparently Virgin Atlantic’s choice of domain for its In-flight Wi-Fi landing page. But what does that mean?

Greetings from sky bar of Airbus A330! Shortly after I boarded my favourite airline, I couldn’t help but notice the crew member sneak in something along the lines of, “If you can’t find the page that lets you connect to Wi-Fi, just go to purple.com and you’ll get there,” during the safety announcement. I did not, at the time know if this was an official branding strategy employed by Virgin or something that the cheeky crew manager made up in the air. Suffice to say, the technical gears in my head started turning rapidly.

It’s clever.

After all purple is Virgin Atlantic’s theme colour, as abundantly evident from cabin décor and colour scheme. But as always, I’m here to help you understand the technical workings behind the scenes that make “claiming” purple.com at 35,000 feet possible.

In real life, the purple.com domain is owned by mattress giant Purple® and is actively used by them. On Earth, visiting purple.com…