By Eileen Falkenberg-Hull
Copyright newsweek
The private jet use marketplace is competitive, and the customers are discerning. Whereas a hotel or resort can focus on implementing competitive strategies while staying at one address, private jets are continuously in motion.To conquer the competition, Flyjets has employed a two-prong strategy encompassing a marketplace and an exchange. “The marketplace works like Airbnb for jets, where we list aircraft as if you list houses. The algorithm to get them there is a bit more complicated, because they’re dynamic assets. Unlike a house that sits in the same place all the time, planes are always moving from place to place, so our uploads have to account for that constant movement,” Jessica Fisher, founder and CEO of Flyjets, told Newsweek.The company has designed its own algorithms to keep up with the challenge. “Rather than someone just constantly putting in new routes for a plane, we design algorithms that sort of think like a human scheduler, and so that we can quote availability and pricing accurately, as if in an Airbnb style marketplace,” Fisher said.Gone are the days of having your assistant call around to try to get you on a flight. No more logging in from your laptop to see what’s available. Booking is done via the company’s app.Flyjets also has an exchange that allows peer-to-peer booking, defined by Fisher as, “group booking, resales of empty legs, et cetera.” She gave an example: “I have a flight going from New York to Florida. I paid $20,000. I want to add three people to my flight and make back $9,000. I could do that through Flyjets.”But, why Flyjets over other services? Fisher has an answer. “Access to a large audience, and to a big network. I can list my flights publicly or privately, publicly means within our general search and/or privately. I just want to do a private listing, I can send it to my own network and have someone then do the transaction. The third benefit is that we take care of the legal and regulatory hurdles and chaos,” she said.Private listings forwarded onto a selected network removes a level of awkwardness. Often, private group fliers would put a whole trip on one person’s credit card, then the others would be responsible for reimbursement.”If I’m going to a wedding in Europe, and there are 20 of us who need to fly from the U.S., I could just go and send [the listing] to my group of friends. I could say, ‘Hey, anyone looking to fly together here, I haven’t booked it yet. Here are my approximate dates. Boom, let’s, let’s go.’ I hate asking people for money. I hate being like, ‘Venmo me,’ it’s just a nightmare. [Flyjets] removes the awkwardness,” Fisher said.
