Aviation is a market rife for disruption. As airlines all move towards models of providing less and charging more - British Airways charging for its stale onboard sandwiches and burnt coffee, Ryan Air vying to profit from customers's bathroom breaks and EasyJet making millions every time you forget to print your boarding pass; it's an understatement to say that flying has lost its mystique. JetSmarter founder and CEO Sergey Petrossov is looking to change that. Florida-based Petrossov is democratising private air travel and creating a community of travellers who are looking to be a part of something better. Your correspondent caught up with Petrossov to understand the vision behind JetSmarter and where the fast-growing company is going.
Talk me through the evolution of the idea from the first brainstorm to the product and the service that we’re experiencing now.
It’s a big, big evolution. I came into contact with private aviation back in 2009, and me and some acquaintances took a private flight in South Florida, and I got to know the company who provided that service. I learnt that the way that you go about booking a private yet, it’s all done over the phone, it’s all manual. There were documents, emails, fax machines and nothing was digital and nothing… of course there was no sharing economy, there was no digital technology and it just seemed archaic. I saw that this industry was pretty much the only industry that hadn’t gone digital and really hadn’t gone online.
And then what?
The real opportunity that we saw was what’s called the sharing economy. We saw a major opportunity to lower the cost of private aviation by allowing consumers to share the private jets. The average private jet is only flying about 200 hours a year, when optimally it could be flying as much as 1,500 hours a year.
So, you have a lot of existing access that hasn’t even been utilised and also the flights that were being flown there were only about two or three people on each flight, so the load factors were very low. So, the supply side was ripe for disruption and then obviously the demand side there’s a massive pool of people who would like to experience private aviation at a lower cost.
And then how did the business model work?
The concept today has really evolved into a community where a certain group of members are the ones who are paying to set the schedule (we call it a socially driven schedule), where a certain member will go in and they’ll create a flight between London and Ibiza - they’ll pay a premium because they are setting the schedule and then other members will aggregate around that schedule and they’ll hop on a flight that was already created.
Now there are some competitors who are doing a similar thing?
So, in the jet sharing economy, we represent about 97% market shares. We really are the disruptor and there may be some niche players out there, companies that are trying to come into the space, but not any that survive this on a country level and a global level.
What are some of the misconceptions about private jet travel?
There’s two sides to that coin. We’re trying to disrupt two types of customer, a. the existing private jet flyer who’s used to flying what we call private meaning they are not used to sharing the aeroplane, they are used to paying for two people to book the whole aeroplane. With them we’re trying to change their behaviour by saying actually it’s okay to share, it’s actually a community, you’re not just going to be on the plane with strangers these are our vetted members so be okay with sharing because it will lower your costs significantly.
Where people would traditionally pay for a flight from London to Ibiza anywhere up to $10,000 just to create a flight. Here they can create that flight for a fraction of the cost say $2,000-3,000 and then other members can hop on it free just for that membership. So, for the existing private jet flyer who’s currently spending $200,000-300,000 a year, their biggest misconception is that they think that sharing is going to be some scary thing and that they are going to be on some plane with some hooligans and it might not be a good service.
And then the second is that there’s a major misconception for business or first-class flyers, who think private jets are out of their league. They think it’s going to cost them $100,000 a year just to be able to fly 10 times, whereas our entry-level price is $15,000 a year and if they are flexible enough we can meet a lot of their travel needs.
What does flying private mean to you?
What we like to say is that commercial flying compares to junk food and private flying is like eating healthy and organic food; it’s a much better lifestyle. It might be a little more expensive, but just not much more and it’s a lot better for you. Most of our marketing is word of mouth, so now we have over 10,000 members but your friend comes to you and says, “I’m using this amazing service you should try it,” you trust your friend. We depend highly on our community to spread the words.
Talk about the community you’re trying to create and your clients?
So, a. we’re a members-only club- you can’t just be a stranger from the outside you’re a vetted member. In terms of the types of customers who are using the product, it’s very diverse. It’s all the way from entrepreneurs, to athletes, to celebrities, Fortune 500 CEOs to just movers and shakers- super travel enthusiasts. We service a very broad type of audience and all these people share one common of vision and that’s to experience travel as it was meant to be.
In practice, what does that community look like?
When they’re in the aeroplane of course that community effect really comes to life because it’s like-minded people sitting in an aeroplane, and they’re getting to know each other, they’re building relationships, they’re trading their business cards, they’re building friendships, they’re building business relationships. That’s something that’s really begun to build a life of its own and that’s why we started to host the various events across different parts of the world because our members get to know each other on the aeroplane but they also want to spend time with each other not just in the aeroplane. So, that’s why building our entire infrastructure on the ground, so that when you come to Miami next, you can come to a place where JetSmarter members get together and you can collaborate and meet other members, not just on the aeroplane but also on the ground.
And how is technology helping you achieve that?
We’re rolling out at the end of this year our own social networking tools in our app that will build our community, and we’ll have a number directory where members can find each other, chat with each other. So, if you flew with somebody but never got their contact information you can find them.
Talk to me about the future of JetSmarter and how will the recent investment help to achieve that?
So, we have two key important elements that we are intending to draw on. A- we need our community to grow in the existing cities that we’re in so that the flight frequency in those cities will increase.
A major portion of our funding is going to go into lowering the pricing point to create flights between certain major cities. So, right now we’re flying New York to Florida I’d say 40 times a week, we want that to go to 300 times a week. We fly New York to L.A four times a week, we want to grow that to 70 times a week. So, we want to grow our existing markets in a very big way and to increase the amount of members who travel between those cities.
And then second of course would be launching new routes. We want to get into Seattle, we want to get into Denver, we want to get into Toronto. And across the world we want to get into India, we want to get into Asia, we want to get into Latin America. So, all these different parts of the world that we’re not in yet, we’d like to get in and start growing JetSmarter.
