Plane Conversations

High Speed transportation has great value for a community and an economy.  If a company like Boeing or Airbus were credited for the amount of time their products restored to the global economy (over the prior fastest transportation technology), their value would be counted in the trillions of dollars in increased productivity.

Introspect marketing

Perhaps this is the way the private aviation community needs to market itself.  Flying private saves time and time has value.  So, just because empty seats are difficult to sell, it does not mean that they don’t have value.

Follow the productivity

The trick is to market the “productivity” of the person sitting in the seat.  This is easy for Corporate Executives to understand, but what about a team of doctors going to a conference?  A single doctor would not charter a full jet, but 7 or 8 may very well afford to fly together.  Same day travel in the medical field is certainly worth the higher cost of a private aircraft, but how would you find 8 doctors who want to fly together?

Hey, Let’s Advertise

Advertising in a Medical Journal averages $45.00 – $88.00 per 1000 impressions of doctors starting at about $10,000 – or you could offer your free empty leg schedule to hospitals in every city where you fly. Guess how fast the word would spread?

Marketing is expensive: (From WebpageFx blog)

• The average price that advertisers pay to access people in the Travel market is $20.00 per 1000 impressions
• The minimum cost for producing and running a National TV advertisement is $100,000 minimum and several million maximum.
• National Magazine Ad cost between $5000-$50,000 for a full page
• Direct Mailing costs $1500- $15000 plus $1.00 – $2.20 per addressee
• Search engine optimization costs $2,500 – $10,000 website development plus content creation and ongoing maintenance of $2,500 – $5,000 per month
• Pay-per-click marketing costs $4000 – $10,000 set up fee plus $.20 – $3.00 per click through.
• National Email Campaign $4,000 – $10,000 to set up plus $500 per month labor, plus content creation for newsletter, and additional to buy email databases other than your own.

Worse yet, most marketing books say that it takes  seven (7) impressions to gain a customer – and that number may be increasing with ad saturation in social media!!!

Solution:

Social Flights collects marketing data, operations data, event data, community data and hospitality data and formats it in a way that allows true cost to be extracted and compared with seat value.  Then we can look into the community to find influential persons who would feature your company in exchange for the seat. We’ll find doctors, executives, bloggers, media, or VIPs who can deliver a targeted marketing message for far less than the cost of hiring marketing staff.

You cannot receive any value for empty legs unless they are listed and available to our network of entrepreneurs, operators, corporations, and media allies.  Social Flights listens to the community to find the NEED, then serve the need wherever appropriate in order to access the free publicity and amplification with which the aviation industry is endowed. Social Flights is the platform for such business development systems.

Next Generation Air Traffic Management represents a major evolution in ground based air traffic control to satellite based air traffic management; it also represents an opportunity for private aviation to deliver far more value to the communities that they serve.

In order to accomplish this, Social Flights is developing a unifying business method that accurately and reliably matches supply and demand for private transportation assets across several thousand airports in the United States. NextGen, combined with the Internet and social media, gives the private aviation industry a set of tools that were unimaginable 20 or 30 years ago when the private aviation market last shifted.

How will private travel evolve?

NextGen will use aviation-specific applications for existing, widely-used technologies such as GPS, Weather Forecasting, data networking, and digital communication. Not surprisingly, these applications will lead to new procedures and airport infrastructure.

Some of these changes may be quite predictable

To get an idea as to how these new technologies will impact aviation, it may be a simple matter to compare how these EXACT same technologies have changed social cooperation in general.  This prediction is valid because we all cooperate for our little piece of the sky.

Society has learned to cooperate in amazing ways as mobile devices, VOIP, GPS, Weather Reports, Traffic Reports, and non-corporate social organization become evermore commonplace.  New business models constantly form around the technology.   The result has been a profound shift in power and influence to those (for better or for worse) who can access and curate relevant information AND then share that information with people in their networks (and beyond).

Social Flights is taking the lead and calling on all private operators to join with us to build a common platform for private aircraft inventory and ground operations across the United States:   

• Where are your jets stationed?
• What inventory do you have available?
• Where are your empty legs going?
• Are you willing to share facilities or “code-share” with other operators?
• Are you willing to cooperate with the major airlines?
• If entrepreneurs in your community had access to the whole system, would this help you?
• If corporations and event planners had access to the whole system, would this help you?
• Are local hospitality and support services sharing information with you?

The New Technology Advantage

Since the late 1800’s America has replaced every single telephone pole with a new one every 50 years or so.  Today, every less developed country can simply build relatively few cellular towers and avoid that mess. For this reason, we can assume that airlines no longer have the advantage of vast hub infrastructure when together, we can just as easily sort people and planes with access to the right data shared across the right network.