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.