I N N O V A T I O N
BUSINESS AIRPORT INTERNATIONAL O C TO B E R 2 0 1 9 |
19
Justin Crabbe
CEO of Jettly
The on-demand private aviation app
What’s your business model?
It’s similar to other on-demand
e-brokers but we strip out the
commission and replace it with a
flat membership fee, which gives the
customer access to our 24 hour booking
team, flight support department and a network
of aircraft and operators. We’re seeing a lot of
customers coming to us from the traditional broker
models. Brokers can be like used car salesmen, in
that you don’t know how much the dealer is making
and you always feel like you’re getting ripped off. We
wanted to make it so that the customer doesn’t have
to shop around anymore.
What is the biggest barrier to your growth?
The availability of operators in certain countries. In
some parts of the world operators don’t work with
brokers in the same way they do in North America
or in Europe. That’s a hurdle because if a request
comes in for an area where we don’t have an
operator then we have to position one in and that
incurs an additional fee.
What proportion of your business is domestic
versus international?
We’re based in Canada and New York, so we regard
the North American market as domestic. At this point
70% of our flights are in North America and 30%
international. But that’s shifting as we have more
rollouts in Europe in particular. It will probably reach
50/50 within the next two years.
How do you stay on top of regulations?
We’re careful to stay within the regulations and our
regulatory compliance personnel constantly monitor
the US Department of Transportation, Transport
Canada and the European and UK regulators,
because it’s an ever-changing field in aviation.
Who is your typical on-demand customer?
About 30 to 40% of our clients are high-net-worth
families flying for private reasons. Most of the rest
are corporate. We have a lot of corporate clients
who own larger transatlantic jets but need something
smaller and more economical for shorter haul flights.
Or because the larger jet is already been used by
one team of executives, they need another plane for
another team of executives.
How is on-demand disrupting the business
aviation market?
Fractional ownership is an antiquated model, similar
to how taxis were before Uber. The other major
model - the jet card model – is similar, in that you
tend to be paying triple the hourly rate of the charter
price. In both cases you have to tie up capital, and
that’s something I see companies moving away from.
They want to keep their capital locked with them
and be able to request the flight on-demand with no
strings attached.
“Fractional ownership
is an antiquated model,
similar to how taxis
were before Uber”