Silverjet is running a promotion offering a free roundtrip ticket if the Giants win the Superbowl and if you purchase a roundtrip between Newark and London-Luton (including tickets which involve Silverjet’s connection to Dubai) between 6am Friday EST (1st February) and 12pm Sunday (3rd February).

I don’t see anything on the Silverjet website about it, but they sent me a press release and there’s no mention of signups or promo codes. It appears that all bookings are eligible.

There are some restrictions on the possible free ticket: the paid ticket must be flown before the free one…if you cancel the paid ticket the free one will go away also… and that free travel will have to be booked by the end of February for travel between March 1 and August 31 and once booked is non-changeable.

So it’s a 2-for-1 offer, maybe.

Especially since the Giants are the fourth biggest Superbowl underdog in history.

Still, if you are going to make a premium class flight to London, Silverjet isn’t a bad way to do it. And the potential kickback is sure a nice one. Might even be enough to make me book away from British Airways for an upcoming trip if I was going to make one anyway (and certainly enough to make me book away from AA!), unless I needed the qualifying points for elite status of course in which case I’d give up the freebie… alas.

Now, it did rather strike me as gambling in some sense. You have to buy a ticket (like a lottery) in order to potentially win a prize. Usually sweepstakes say something like ‘no purchase necessary, write to such and such address in Ohio or Colorado with your info on a 3×5 card in order to get a free entry’.

Alas, no free entry possibilities here! I would sure love to have entered to win a free Silverjet roundtirp without purchasing the ticket, but that’s because based out of DC I’m otherwise-unlikely to be planning to buy a London flight that departs Newark.

I asked the P.R.-type pushing the offer how they manage to stay within various state laws (potentially laws of the states from which customers are purchasing tickets, although I’m not an attorney and could be wrong).

They pointed me to this article about how premiums which are offered if a specific sporting outcome occurs are becoming increasingly common, some folks think they’re illegal but there probably won’t be any prosectuion. Which is a good thing. Because as the Massachussets Attorney General’s office noted in the piece, consumers aren’t really complaining or being harmed.  Which finally strikes me as a bureaucrat who makes some sense.

And I rather like a company not beholden to its conservative legal department, willing to take some risks for a bit of fun.