So, you’re planning a journey from London (where you live and work) up to Glasgow for a business meeting –where would your first port of call be? For me, it was a price comparison site to look into flights, and for around £120 return per person it would take just over an hour to travel from London Stansted to Glasgow airport. As an alternative, a train from London Euston to Glasgow Central, costing around £140 return, would take between 4 and 5 hours each way. At first glance it seems like a pretty straight-forward decision, with air travel coming out on top in terms of both time and money. Upon second inspection however, once you consider ancillary factors – such as transport to/from the airports, check-in and airport security – the cost of flying is closer to £175 return and the journey takes around 4 hours. In addition to this, travelling directly by train (although it takes fractionally longer overall) gives you up to 5 hours of uninterrupted preparation time for your meeting later that day. You can relax and enjoy a leisurely journey rather than getting a taxi (or train) to the airport where you will then spend two hours in transit and waiting around for your departure. The key, especially when it comes to business, is using resources efficiently and establishing what is your driving factor. Is it better to spend less time and/or money travelling by a means that inhibits productivity, or to spend a little more getting from A to B (and perhaps onto C, D and E) in a way that allows you to continue your day as if you were in the office? From the point of view of the aviation industry, it seems extraordinary that flying can still be beaten by trains.

When it comes to travel (whether for business or leisure, domestic or international) people don’t tend to think in terms of their entire journey; it is very rare for anyone to be travelling exclusively between two airports, so why is it typically thought of this way? It most likely stems from the fact that travellers tend to naturally have a commercial travel mind-set, where they have limited options and are restricted by airline routes and schedules. This has by extension flowed in to how people think about private aviation; this is mistaken because passengers tend to have greater choice in airfield and generally much more freedom and flexibility in the way they travel. Unfortunately this is rarely taken advantage of. Why is the entire door-to-door trip (or postcode-to-postcode as we say here at Stratajet) not taken into consideration? A traveller is more likely to be travelling from their office in London to a meeting at their client’s office in Paris, rather than directly from London City airport to Le Bourget.

According to the Stratajet system there are 29 airfields within 100km of the centre of London; ranging from the behemoth that is London Heathrow to the Capital’s last-remaining operational RAF station, Northolt. As a result of this, no matter where in the nation’s capital you may be departing from, you are not as far from an airfield as you may initially think. Whether it’s the industry having a tendency towards using the larger more publicised and airfields (i.e. Luton, Farnborough, Biggin Hill, etc.) or taking comfort in the familiar the majority of airfields in the south-east are heavily under-utilised. With familiar pricing and generally a wider selection of services, these airfields may boast ease of access and a greater degree of flexibility, but in terms of getting from A to B are not necessarily the most efficient option for the passenger. And surely the whole point of providing a service is to facilitate the customer’s needs as best as possible.

One of the main attractions of private aviation is the convenience and flexibility it can offer its passengers - escaping the crowds of scheduled airlines, avoiding the hassle of major airports and being able to travel to a mutable schedule. However, today’s industry is not consistently delivering these benefits to its customers. The process of private travel would become even more streamlined and more convenient by taking the entire journey into consideration, not just the flight itself. This is where Stratajet comes in.

With Stratajet, the customer simply specifies their origin and destination locations (whether a landmark, postcode or airfield), date/time (according to either ‘departing at’ or ‘arriving by’) and number of passengers (or amount of cargo). From this information, and all in a matter of seconds, our Compliance Engine cross-references the customer’s itinerary with appropriate aircraft (considering schedule, MTOW, seats, etc.), crew (training, duty hours, qualifications, etc.) and airfields (location, opening times, fire category, etc.) to give them a variety of options, which then can then filter, compare and actually book online. Through the combination of allowing passengers to specify their actual departure and arrival points, and the corroboration of pricing and compliance information for Europe’s 2000+ airfields, we can serve our customers better by giving them greater choice and a far more efficient service. We can reduce their overall travel time by choosing the closest, or at least most suitable, airport (considering actual drive time rather than distance) and most efficient aircraft combination according to their requirements. In addition to this (depending on their preferences), we can save time and money by utilising smaller aircraft that cost less to run and that can get into smaller, cheaper and less-congested airfields, which may even be closer to their origin/destination. Stratajet also gives the customer the opportunity to make further financial savings, through the smarter optimisation of aircraft, where real-time availability encourages the use of pre-existing ‘empty leg’ flights to fulfil new flights that are requested along similar routes.

As we’ve covered in earlier posts, the private aviation industry is highly fragmented and inefficient. With such a large proportion of airfields being massively underutilised, there is a lot that we, the providers, can do to make private jet charter the smooth business tool that it should be, and much that can be done to improve the overall experience for our customers. It’s important for all of us involved in the industry – from charter broker to customer - to understand that private aviation should not simply be reduced to a flight, but should be regarded as a complete service and as such, a useful tool that considers their every need at each step of the entire journey, from meeting to meeting, postcode to postcode, door to door.

Christina Hayes
Marketing Assistant