Plane Conversations

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.

Every industry from agriculture to retail to energy production experiences unsellable merchandise.  Losses may be due to spoilage or theft or the inability to sell product within a certain expiration date – this is the case for empty legs.

Excess inventory is usually steeply discounted or written off as a loss. Costs that cannot be recovered are passed on to the customer.  If the customer “penalty” is too high, the demand shrinks and unsellable merchandise increases – This forces a contraction in the industry where demand can drive prices up further.

Suppose we know that the existing market for private travel can sustain $1.20 per seat mile price point such that an 8-seat airplane costs $10,000.00 to travel 1000 miles plus an empty return flight. Now suppose that the price per seat mile could be reduced to $.60 by sharing the plane with 16 people (8 in each direction)?  Would cutting the price in half effectively double the  number of people who could afford private travel?

Half empty or half full…or Both

We could certainly draw a line on a graph that would represent how market size would shift if we floated the value between $1.20 and $.60 per seat mile?  We can achieve this through any combination of inbound and outbound passengers between 8 and 16.

Social Flights is building a platform that can pool empty leg inventory by consolidating data provided by hundreds of operators.  The same platform can be used by communities to pool likely passengers attending events, sporting games, corporation travelers,  and conference attendees.  The same platform will be used to match the supply to the demand on a national level.  With a large enough system, it should no longer matter if it is an empty leg or a primary leg – all legs are primary.

The ability to salvage empty seat inventory while lowering costs for all seats will increase the size of the market for private jet services. The aircraft can fly more revenue miles per month in a larger market instead of remaining stationary waiting for a smaller market of passengers.  The airplane can deliver a higher net revenue per mile when both legs are full and priced correctly than when priced at cost-plus.

With Social Flights, operators can increase their volumes by lowering primary prices and adding return leg revenue. Owners will favor a operator that can deliver the highest utilization of their aircraft. Operators can now challenge brokers with a competitive alternate market for private service.  Travelers can now challenge the commercial airlines for service and time value.  At the end of the day, those who share information will have a competitive advantage over those who hoard information.

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.