Plane Conversations

This morning we received a great comment from a reader named Peter.  He posts a valid question and I had to think about it for a few minutes before I could bring up a response.  Unfortunately, as with most questions, there is a simple answer and a complicated one.

Peter wrote:

I’ll be curious to see if eventually non-stop flights between these four cities will be established eliminating the need to connect through Branson. While this promises to be a great alternative to the airlines the current configuration is still a hub and spokes model. Here’s hoping we’ll see non-stop flights between these cities in the future.

Peter is referring to newly introduced air service between Nashville, Austin, Milwaukee, flying through Branson MO.  Admittedly, this is a pretty strange arrangement, especially since Branson only has 20,000 people whereas the other three metro areas have over 500,000 people each.

Who in their right mind would put a hub in the smaller city?

Branson is the Live Entertainment Capital of the Midwest.  The community of Branson came together to support these flights with a high level of civic involvement and passenger engagement with a high quality “service” model.  Branson is safe, clean, and they even own the airport.  The people of Branson are very proud of what they have built and want to share it with the world.  They dare to be different.

Social Flights partnership with Branson demonstrates that air service can empower a community, not cowering to the whips and whims from the corporate boardroom of a publicly traded airline.

A hub airport is like a big egg sorter for people and planes (where people are the eggs and the planes are the cartons).

A big part of our business model is to integrate with what is happening on the ground. Imagine if Amazing places like Vail Colorado, or Chelan WA, or the Grand Canyon were easily accessible.  Imagine your next industry conference at a resort in the Ozarks instead of downtown Newark.

***

Now, here’s the complicated answer

If nobody is going to Branson, the plane can just fly the hypotenuse.  Try that with hub and spoke

Few people realize the extraordinary opportunity that exists for some communities to literally fly under the radar of the commercial airlines.  Far too often, people are trained to believe that the airlines are the only game in town and if they quote a price, flight time, and wait time, then that must be the best deal out there.  Nothing gives us more pleasure than to demonstrate quite the opposite.

Branson and Nashville

There are no nonstop flights between Nashville and Branson Missouri.  Frontier charges $507.00 and the flight – with connections – takes 8 hours.   Social Flights can fulfill this route for around 260 dollars for a non-stop flight that lasts only one hour – this is an astonishing 50% cheaper and 80% faster that flying commercial.

Branson and Milwaukee

There are no nonstop flights between these cities.  Commercial carriers can provide access but it cost you $335.00 to travel 6 hours.  Social Flights provides non-stop service for $290 dollars in only 2 hours.

 Branson and Austin

There are no non-stop flights between Branson and Austin.  However, Frontier will charge you $523 dollars to leave you in Denver and take an amazing 23 hours! Clearly, it would be faster to drive.  Social Flights provides this flight for $290.00 non-stop and will have you there is 2 hours.

The Functionally Stranded

Thousands of communities across the United States are functionally stranded when they need to pay more in real cost than twice the airfare to reach their destination.   This creates a substantial friction to a local economy since both outbound and inbound passengers suffer the friction loss.

Keeping it Real

OK, so who cares about places like Branson MO, Tri-Cities TN, Somerset KY, Arlington WA, and Danbury CT?  The answer is that millions of people are functionally and economically stranded without global air transportation options – they care deeply.

It does not take long to realize that there are thousands upon thousands of routes  and millions of people in our great country where Social Flights can thoroughly and without question outperform the major airlines in the simple task of connecting real people to the real places that they really want to go.

At Social Flights, we are continually amazed at the communities that we work with looking for an opportunity to bypass commercial airline service.  Communities know what they want and they know where they want to go – most importantly, in the great American Tradition, they are not waiting for someone else to do it for them.   Tri-Cities Tennessee is one such community.

In Tennessee and Virginia the name “Tri-Cities” refers to the region comprising the cities of Kingsport, Johnson City and Bristol and the surrounding smaller towns and communities in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. All three of the principal cities are located in the extreme northeastern corner of Tennessee, while Bristol has a Twin city of the same name on the Virginia side.

Tri Cities is one of those great places that few people know about.  They represent a vibrant American community of over 500,000 located in a beautiful part of the country with mild temperate weather yet in close proximity to many economically important places such as Nashville, Washington, DC, New York, Atlanta, St. Louis, etc.   When airlines cut service to a community like Tri-Cities, they cut off a half million people from the vast economic opportunity.

Similarly, the deprive many people of a wonderful place to visit, vacation, or  relocate to.  By all accounts, Tri-Cities is a magnificent place to raise a family.  Tri-Cities has an abundance of recreational opportunities in nearby Lake Boone, the Blue Ridge Mountains, rivers and forest. Real estate is still reasonably priced.

Social Flights is looking forward to an opportunity to provide air service to Tri-Cities and the remarkable people who make up that community.  It is our sincere desire to create an air service plan that meets the needs of so many 500K population communities across the United States.  With Tri-Cities, we all get there together!

Tri-cities Events

Source: World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) 2011

Communities, industries, and economic development agencies are looking for solutions to the travel gaps caused by airline consolidation, regulation, and lack of alternate modes of transportation.  Millions of American citizens are literally stranded in travel access dead zones.

Besides developing revolutionary social technology for buyers and suppliers of alternative air services, Social Flights also provides professional services to organizations, institutions and governments wishing to improve air service to their constituencies. Our services portfolio is designed to serve national and international markets including Asia, Europe and South America as well as local and affinity group communities.

Social Flights Consulting Services

Our service portfolio is aimed at providing 21^st century air service solutions created from innovative data-driven assessment, analysis and strategy. Our professional services team includes resources with credentials in private aviation, airline operations, aircraft manufacturing, statistical analysis, management consulting, strategic development, engineering, planning, yield management, route planning and aircraft acquisition.

Our services include:

• Air Service Determinations
• True Flier Intentions Base Determination & Definition
• Air Services Strategic and Tactical Planning
• Economic Impact & Opportunity Analyses
• Demand Opportunity Analyses
• Private Aviation Services management
• Social Media Marketing, SEO, Community Organization

The genesis of Social Flight Consulting Services came when we all sat in a room together and each looked around at the talent and experience that was looking back at us.

Our people have operated airlines, we have managed airport operations, built substantial FBO operations and facilities.  Our people have held top engineering positions in aircraft manufacturers, we have worked for the Federal Government, we are world travelers, global businesspersons, and economic development professionals.   The people associated with Social Flights are pilots, mechanics, authors, and teachers.  We have world famous social media experts, top travel bloggers, and we come from hospitality industries, event planning, and  entrepreneurial communities.

Let us share ourselves with you.

In upcoming blog posts, we will share the details of each of these services as well as case studies, documented accomplishments  and personnel highlights.

Our hope is to bring the private air services industry closer in collaboration rather than further in competition.  We strongly believe that private operators are far stronger when united than in competition. With airline failures and increase air travel demand, we need to work together with our communities.  We are here to share what we have learned with travelers, communities, tourism / hospitality industries, and economic development agencies.

Social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are no longer just the shiny new soapbox for advertisers, they have become powerful tools for organizing communities.

We all know that social media campaigns have become the PR machine of the modern airline, but they still fail to understand the difference between community awareness and harnessing the power of community engagement.

Who has time to Twitter?  

Many private operators are too focused on the day-to-day business of keeping their fleet in top readiness to start the long haul learning curve of social media marketing and SEO.

As a result, those same few brokers and agents (you know who they are) appear on the top of the search engine listing even in your city search!   While paid search placement may buy some brand awareness for the brokers, only active blogging, worthy cross linking and strategic partnerships produce the powerful engagements that bring you customers who bring you customers who bring you customers, and so on.

Building these relationships can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive. 

Social Flights has trained and experienced account managers that can efficiently carry out the most productive social media presence for  private operators and their respective traveler community, economic development agencies, and hospitality partners.

Social Flights offers:

• Syndication of Social Flights blog articles
• Unique blog contents specific to your operation and community.
• Cross linkages with other operators, tourism boards, hospitality, and corporate business centers
• Strategic Twitter campaigns, Facebook pages, G+, press release support, and cross posting with sister cities
• Package formation with festivals, recreation, conventions, and events; locally and across North America
• Cooperative marketing with sister city operators.

Social Flights draws on our unique experience in ride sharing systems and yield management for private aircraft inventory. Social Flights uses up-to-the-minute social media techniques to organize communities around available private aircraft capacity, public charter opportunities, and empty leg fulfillment.

Social Flights draws from our national databases of event organizers, universities, corporate clusters, and diverse industries allowing us to help you identify, influence, and match supply and demand for private air service priced on a per-seat basis.   This allows travelers to form a true comparison of the “time-value” of private air service versus commercial air service.

Finally, we also provide you with ways to spot opportunities that commercial airlines simply cannot serve at any price.

Please consider adding Social Flights Services to your marketing mix.   Give us a call for a free strategy session and let’s see where we can integrate your air service operation with the entire national travel services industry.

illustration by Sean Driscoll

The Premise of Social Flights is to combine social media (the way that people communicate) with air travel (the places that people go).  It turns out that the relationship between the two are correlated – they impact on each other.

Steve Inskeep with National Public Radio (NPR) recently hosted a program featuring new research that suggests that twitter connections follow airline connections.

Or, could it be the other way around – or both?

From NPR: The premise of Twitter, one of the premises, is that geography no longer matters, that we are bound together by common interests and not by where we live. And the second premise is that Twitter is a truly democratic medium, that you could be living in a small town in a country no one’s heard of but you could have a megaphone now that is heard all over the world.

According to research conducted by sociologist Barry Wellman at the University of Toronto, who analyzed half a million tweets to learn where people are tweeting from and who is following them, twitter traffic in many ways follows airline routes.

From NPR: [Looking at]  airline connections, looking at all the hubs that are connected to one another. And what Wellman has found in Toronto is that the airline connections between your city and the rest of the world predict where your Twitter followers are going to be. So if your Twitter followers are an airline flight away, they’re much more likely to have Twitter connections to you than if they’re not accessible by a plane.

While such result makes for an popular general interest story, the implications for economic development of smaller cities may be profound.  Small cities that do not have airline connections may actually be shut off from the amplification of social media.  Furthermore, as airlines continue to retract service to small communities and concentrate around hubs, the fewer social connections will form between groups of people.

This research is deeply important for economic development professionals who are trying to keep corporations in town, who are trying to build new industries, and who are trying to attract talent and create jobs. The failure of airlines to serve their community may be amplified across the globe.

Connect with Social Flights and reconnect with the world 

We would like to think that Social Media makes the world more flat, but instead, the world is somewhat lumpy.  Those communities not perched on a lump are still at a disadvantage to having their voices heard.

Almost 13 years ago, Doc Searls coined that most infamous mantra of the Social Media revolution among the 95 theses in the  Cluetrain Manifesto “Markets are Conversation”.  The corollary should be; “kill the conversation and you kill the market”. The more factors that disconnect smaller cities, the less likely that air service could ever return.

Social Flights puts the power of the social media revolution back into the hands of small communities by deploying a fleet of private aircraft to amplify the collective voice of smaller communities, not the boardrooms of the commercial airlines.

Social Flights introduces a common platform for travelers to access private jet inventory.  By decreasing the cost of organizing individual passengers, our partner operators are rewarded with access to groups of people ready to purchase your primary and your empty legs.

Empty legs are created after an airplane delivers passengers to a destination and must then return back to base empty.  The pilots must return to their families and the aircraft must return to service or scheduled maintenance.  The result is that up to 40% of private aircraft flights are empty.  Over the years there have been many attempts to sell empty seats but success rates rarely exceed 5%.

This creation of empty legs increases the cost (to the customer) of private travel to approximately double the one-way cost of their payload.  The resulting high cost of private travel limits the size of the market and the restricts utilization of aircraft for the owners.

It is expensive to deploy a professional sales staff without prequalifying the customer for sufficient resources, frequency of travel, and repeat business.  A high quality sales force is required because aviation is a complex industry and the price of the product can easily exceed 5 digits.

Empty legs are expensive to sell because the passenger does not walk through the door prequalified.  Empty seats are even more expensive to sell because it takes the same amount of time to sell an individual seat as it does the whole plane; and each person and their special need multiplies the level of complexity.  Finally, the FAA is very strict on the operator’s ability to schedule flights making it difficult to advertise empty legs or empty seats.

The economic value of empty legs would be huge if a platform existed that could sell them as primary flights.  Social Flights has combined our expertise in charter operations with social media organization to create exactly such a system.

Social Flights Creates an environment where operators can minimize the cost of selling empty legs by providing a common information platform that engages and educates the traveler so that a sales professional is not needed to manage every deal.  Social Flights uses social media tools and methods to help people self-organize around an operator’s inventory wherever it may be.  Social Flights combines inventory from many operators in many locations to offer travelers a seamless experience.  Social Flights manages contracts, consideration, and payments.

If you are an owner or operator, we’ll show you how to send us your inventory and scheduling feeds at no cost and we’ll do the rest.  As our system grows, we’ll deploy community organizers across the country and among substantial verticals who will bring customers right to your door step so that you can deliver them right to their door step.

Yesterday’s blog post argued that we cannot price any air transportation correctly until we price all air transportation correctly.

This means that if a trip were priced in proportion to it’s distance, then competition between airlines would amount to battles for internal efficiency rather than price wars dependent on short haul passengers subsidizing long haul passengers – plus “gotcha” fees, and unbundled services, increased government regulation, etc.

This would also allow smaller aircraft to be priced correctly in a time/value model…

The long-term view of wrong pricing

Livability is defined in terms of employment, safety, crime education and transportation. City planners, communities, and transportation officials allocate money towards projects, services and amenities that balance these objectives.  They also must react to the influence of external forces. The airlines have a disproportionate power to impact an entire economy by manipulating prices and services.

Losing the proximity war

Without proportional pricing, planners do not have a built-in proximity bias that can support multi-mode projects such as rail, bus, and ferry services.  If the price is the same to fly 500 miles as 3000 miles, a form of tunnel vision in regional economic development may appear.

Only 6 airports have direct rail service

Negative incentives

The hub and spoke system also introduces negative incentives to regionalization.  The time that it takes to travel between non-hub locations 500 miles apart often exceeds the time it takes to fly to a distant hub 3000 miles away.

Yet, families and friends want to disperse in much shorter distances.  Small companies want to branch out in smaller segments.  A regional tourism industry is easier to support than attracting distant tourists. Innovation clusters need space to diversify.  The flawed airline pricing model combined with profit driven hub and spoke economics may actually thwart natural growth in favor of unsustainable growth.  It makes little economic sense to disaggregate people from the land that they occupy.

Social Flights is much more than a ride-sharing system for jets.  Social Flights is a social organization concept that allows air transportation to serve the needs of communities as people reorganize themselves in the Digital Age.   Social Flights allows for rapid and effective air service to be deployed to the natural foundations of economic growth instead of trying to force growth to occur wherever the airlines choose to fly.

Smaller aircraft can fly efficiently between smaller markets as long as the price can be compared to the same time/value criteria  as larger jets. People have extraordinary access to information from which to make superior decisions. However, when the wrong pricing model distorts the right decisions, only the best-worst decision is available.  This is inefficient – it’s time to take off the blinders.

Social flights continues to grow as our users finding new ways to integrate private jet service into their experience travel itinerary.  As with most early adopters, there is a larger vision driving their actions – it’s not to be “first on the block” to experience private travel.  They are the “first OFF the block” in a new form of luxury; The Time Value Experience.

Luxury does not mean the same thing for everyone and this poses a challenge for brands and product designers.  The top tier brands are learning that 45-55 year old who make up a large portion of their markets have a different set of standards when it comes to travel.

Instead of wanting to be pampered with exquisite and precision service, the new generation of luxury travel is seeking value, authenticity, and uniqueness.  They want local experiences, not a duplicate of their home in a new place.

“Value Based Driven”

via Young, affluent travelers disavow luxury defined by older generation – Travel Weekly.

Ellen Bettridge, vice president of American Express Retail Travel Network, told agents and hoteliers attending the 2011 International Luxury Travel Market conference in Cannes, France, last month. “They just know more. Everything’s at their fingertips.”

Knowing your customer’s preferences and accommodating those preferences are two different things in hi-end travel.  Creating “value” is not easy, it takes a lot of work, planning, and technical knowledge as well as follow-up and community management.  Unique experiences, by definition,  don’t come with instructions for the service provider. Competition, by definition, attacks the uniqueness of your service.  Alternatives to your service are as easy for competitors to market as for you.

One of the best ways to achieve uniqueness is to use your brand to integrate with other experience services – a local competitor may not be a competitor after all.   Think about Disneyland;  Mickie Mouse does not compete with Pirates of the Caribbean, rather, they are integrated into the whole grand experience.

If your guests will come for one 2 days, they are more likely to stay for 4 than return for another 2. Then, they are more likely to return if they haven’t “done the whole park”.  If they become comfortable with a place, they will return over and over forming new family traditions that they can identify with and share with their friends…..

Chris Sanderson, co-founder of the Future Laboratory, a London-based brand-marketing firm, asserted, “It’s not about ‘fly and flop.’ It’s about ‘find and seek.’” What makes serving this group tricky is that agents can’t fall back on tried-and-true brands, at least when it comes to accommodations. 

Social Flight is capable and available to serve any community by providing operations in public charter and private charter with modern turbine aircraft.  We have a growing clientele of vacation and resort communities banding together and taking control of the tourist experience instead of depending on outside airlines, charter operators, or tour organizers to do it for them.  Make the “Time Value Experience” your Brand image and make Social Flights your airline.

Google Search for the term "Jet Charter"

Google Think Insights is an amazing resource for looking at who is searching on certain terms, and from where.  This post shows two search categories and related terms from which we can draw several general ideas about private air travel.  These data demonstrates that an increasing amount of people are searching on terms such as private jet, jet charter, VIP travel, etc.

Another curious trend is the term “Jet Charter Cost” is also increasing significantly as people seek to find the value threshold for private air travel vs commercial air travel.

Recession or transition?

These data all refer to a date range between the dates of january 2008 and December 2011 corresponding to the greatest economic downturn in the US since the Depression.  There are likely many forces acting on the market including the pullout of commercial aviation from minor market, few travel alternatives,  increased usage of internet search technology, increased business travel needs, and upper class growth rates.

The increase in terms related to cost may suggest that even the most wealthy are becoming cost conscious, more people want to fly private, more businesses need to fly private in order to access their market, and more VIP travel is required.

It is not surprising that the term “business aviation” has a similar location density to the term “Jet Charter”.  This reinforces the suggestion that corporations increasingly need to send their executives on travel outings.

Social Flights is in the business of social organization too:

It is likely that wherever executives go, so too will managers and lower level employees.  Social Flights has long suggested that there is an opportunity to increase private charter shuttle service between key locations.  Likewise, there are opportunities for companies to share private aircraft scheduled to fly between regions.

Next we looked at the term “VIP Travel” and identified the following locations where the terms were searched.  We found a similar increase in VIP Travel related terms as we did for terms related to jet charter costs, except related to supporting services such as reservation, booking, schedules, and services.

This suggests that the door-to-door experience is underserved and that an air transportation service that is able to connect the dots would hold a true value advantage over one that just drops the passenger off at a hub airport.

Search terms are important because they indicate the intentions of a market.

While little is ever conclusive, the rate at which something changes can say more than the thing being observed alone.  At Social Flights, the demands of a dynamic market are clear.

1. Companies must have business travel options.

2. A door-to-door value proposition is essential.

3. People are searching online more than ever

4. The commercial airline industry leaves a market underserved.

Economic recessions have been shown to be more about technological transition and adjustment rather than any single underlying factor.  We believe that this transition will be no different.