Archive for the ‘sell’ Category:
Why Fly Empty?
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.