Lessons From The Jet Set

“What really makes me feel successful is being able to use my life in service to someone else’s,” Oprah Winfrey noted in her 2009 commencement remarks at Duke.

She then noted:

“And it is really fantastic to have your own jet, and anybody who says it isn’t is lying to you. That jet thing is really good.”

While jet ownership is doubtlessly fantastic — especially Oprah’s jet, which we imagine is full of her favorite things — the vast majority of people will never quite be that successful. However, a somewhat less rarefied consumer class of business and leisure travelers rent the fantastic private jet experience, with the help of businesses like Skyjet.

“We’re first and foremost a private jet company,” noted Skyjet President Greg Richman. “We started as a private jet operator. We work with pilots. I’m a pilot myself. Our basic focus is aviation at all times.”

And while the consumer class for chartered private jet travel is somewhat more crowded than the one Oprah resides in, it is by no means a mass consumer good. Sessions are priced in thousands and often tens of thousands of dollars.

This might lead one to conclude that there is not much in the way of things to be learned from private jet travel for a general retail audience. After all, private jets don’t serve the general consumer.

But PYMNTS’ recent conversations with Skyjet’s Richman might just persuade you otherwise, since most of the lessons Skyjet has learned while it has grown and evolved with its marketplace over almost two decades has led them to conclude that how you sell is as important as what you sell.

“Whether you are accessing private jets or accessing a pizza, the customer is trying to access what they want as quickly and seamlessly as possible. That’s true if they are calling, ordering on the Web or using an app.”

Accessing a private jet is both more complex and riskier than accessing a pizza. Like many luxury goods, private jet charters can attract fraudsters, and the marketplace has been slow to advance in some segments.

“We started in 1997 as the first online quoting system for private jets,” Richman noted. “We actually have an active patent for connecting those flights, and we have been arranging private jet charters for both leisure and business travelers as seamlessly as possible since then.”

“The charter market today is entirely fragmented, and often in order to secure jets, a consumer will have to call in, have to use a credit card and then have to take the extra step of copying the front and back of the card and faxing it,” Richman noted.

That has been the inefficiency the firm has been trying to fix — first through an online (and optimized for mobile) website that makes it easier to quote and book flights online. More recently with the launch of an iOS app. The new app will allow customers to do something that has so far been impossible on mobile for the firm: book and pay for their chartered flight using Apple Pay.

“Since mobile really started becoming important for our business and leisure customers, it has been been the vision for some time to allow customers to leverage that to secure a jet really quickly and safely with just the tap of your thumb,” Richman noted. “But Apple Pay with the bio-authentication [and tokenization] was the first product that really made it possible.”

The new app and tie-in with Apple Pay, Richman explained, is just an expansion of the company’s main mission.

“Our business is about split 50-50 between leisure and business users. Although we have technologically upgraded with the app, the infrastructure and the payments-centered experience, we are one of the largest private jet companies working in the U.S. right now,” Richman noted. “We’re not a technology company. We use technology to reach the maximum number of people that we possibly can with great customer service.”

Private jets are not an easy line of work to be in. Often Skyjet finds itself juggling bookings that involve multiple city stops in a single day — sometimes with rather short notice. And different clients, Richman added, want different things. Some users, he said, fully expect to continue booking travel over the phone — while corporate users fully expect to do business via an app and its multiple travel management capabilities.

“Every trip is different and unique, and we treat each trip as a though it is a performance. We have to make sure that we are always able to change with different city pairs because it is customized,” Richman said. “Customization is a challenge, and getting a jet with the tap of the finger is just the beginning of the job for us.”

It is a job they are facing more competition from these day — especially as an increasing number of up-and-comers to the marketplace are looking to solve the fragmentation in the market by Uberizing it with a flexible online/mobile booking platform.

“It’s a highly competitive and growing market, and there are lots of startups. I think this is a good thing because it innovates; it allows our industry to grow and change,” Richman noted.

And ultimately he is not worried. The technology part of the platform and the seamlessness in browsing and payment are important, according to Richman, and are becoming more so with startups creeping in and looking to disrupt. But Skyjet also runs and specializes in the second part of the experience — the trip itself, often the harder part to master and not a skill the firm picked up overnight. And, he thinks, the advances in tech can only make them better at delivering on all parts of the experience.

“We really think this market is going to continue to grow, and we want to be the forefront leaders of taking private jet aviation to the next level. With Apple Pay and we making it accessible at the tap of your thumb, how simple is that.”