Listen to this articleStratajet is the world’s first ‘real-time’ private jet booking platform, providing instant and accurate costs and availability of private jets. The company has recently secured a $8 Million round of investment led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investors Playfair Capital and JamJar Investments, bringing its total funding to $14 Million to date.
Below is our interview with Jonny Nicol, Founder and CEO of Stratajet:
Q: Jonny, tell us how the idea to create Stratajet was born?
A: After a stint in the military I became a corporate freelance pilot, which included flying private jets. This led me to realise there were two huge gaping holes in the industry, not just in terms of the way the industry served its customers – although undoubtedly this was a problem – but more importantly, inefficiencies and wastage that were always going to stop the private jet industry being accepted by a wider audience.
The first problem is that the control private jet brokers exert on the industry means the process of booking a private jet is hugely inefficient. You have to phone a broker, and the broker in turn has to phone a very fragmented base of private jet operators to get a number of quotes. Those quotes have to be manually calculated by the operators, factoring in a huge number of variables, and the whole process is therefore terribly time-consuming, usually taking several hours.
What’s more, there is a staggering amount of wastage across the industry; around 40% of all private jet flights are flown empty. Last year, in Europe, around 260,000 flights private jets moved without any passengers. This means the cost of a private flight is very high as you’re not just paying for the trip you take – you’re paying the return leg too.
So we’re looking at the potential of Stratajet to solve these two major problems of private jet travel. Stratajet is the only platform in the world that has the ability to provide prices of private jets in real-time and the solution of adapting empty legs to suit the passenger. By revolutionising private aviation, we aim to make private jet travel more accessible to the mainstream traveller and fundamentally change the way people travel.
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Q: Could you please give us more insights into Stratajet´s functionality?
A: Stratajet has been described as the ‘world’s most sophisticated price comparison site’. It’s an extremely complicated, cutting-edge piece of technology, which took five years to develop.
It took so long to build because we had to gather data from 2,107 airfields across Europe – as opposed to the 500 or so that are used regularly for commercial flights – and programme the algorithms. Unfortunately there were no short-cuts here as there are a mind-boggling amount of calculations required to provide a quote; if you fly somewhere privately, you pay 15 sets of fees, only one of which is the aircraft itself. There are 14 other sets of fees, including the specific airports, handling agents, government airspace, tax, all of which vary enormously. For example there are 247 different variables to consider when calculating a landing fee, all of which could affect the cost by 1000s of Euros, so we have to be exactly accurate.
Stratajet runs all of these calculations for any given flight route, across all available aircraft, in around ten seconds – that’s on average 800% faster than the traditional method.
Q: What are main benefits of using Stratajet platform?
A: Stratajet is the first and only software that can provide real-time, accurate prices of private jet flights, and include empty legs in its flight searches. It’s the only platform in the world that has the potential to fundamentally change the way people travel and both aircraft operators and passengers can reap the benefits.
We provide our sophisticated quoting tool – Stratafleet – to operators free of charge and this removes the need for them to manually provide private jet quotes, saving many man-hours. Stratafleet is the most advanced quoting software in the world, with guaranteed accuracy of quotes as well as the ability to adapt empty legs to suit passengers. Streamlining the whole private jet quoting process means that the operators’ margins can be improved, which in turn can filter down to the passenger as the prices of private jet flights are reduced.
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Q: You’ve recently raised a $8 Million funding round, what are your plans?
A: Yes, the business has recently secured a $8 Million round of investment (led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investors Playfair Capital and JamJar Investments), bringing our total funding to $14 Million to date. This has helped develop additional functionality in the platform’s quoting tool. The updated version of Stratafleet – version 3.0 – includes additional technical functionality to further benefit aircraft operators. Features include the ability to look up a given airport (or list of airports around a chosen destination) to check not only airfield fees, but also operational data such as opening hours, fire category levels and more.
From a consumer perspective, we launched to the flying public in April 2016 after a rigorous tour of Europe to bring aircraft operators onto the system and we are now live in 44 countries in Europe. We have similar plans underway to expand into the U.S. market later in the year.
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Q: How would you convince the reader to start using Stratajet?
A: Operators and passengers should use Stratajet because we’re unique in the industry. We have no ‘competitors’ although the industry thinks we’re one of many. The reason for that is other companies make bold claims about being ‘online brokers’, but they’re not; they’re brokers who have a website. They do not have the technology to do what Stratajet does. So one of the biggest challenges we now face is differentiation and trying to make people realise that we are telling the truth and everyone else is lying. The problem for us is cutting through that.
This transfers to when we’re speaking to operators, who are wary of other ‘online brokers’ who simply inundate them with quote requests, which take time to produce manually. With Stratajet, operators don’t get quote requests, as we generate accurate and real-time prices electronically on their behalf, so the passengers are able to book directly. Our pricing engine is 100% accurate and it’s instantly bookable.
What’s more, in the short time since ‘going live’ we have been able to generate an unprecedented two million private jet flight quotes, proving how effective our system can be at giving a wider range of travellers access to the private jet industry.
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