Looking across the office at my team working away, it’s hard to believe how far we’ve come in the three years since the idea of Stratajet first came to me. Now seems like a good time to give a brief explanation of the genesis of Stratajet.
Upon selling my last company, I was kicking my heels around Oxford with little to do aside from keeping up my flying experience by helping out a few charter companies with some ad hoc flights. One such company was Hangar 8, and it was on one of their missions, with a chap called Ben Cooper, that I first had the idea that was to become Stratajet.
This particular sortie was to return an empty CJ2 to London from the South of France. As we were getting onto the aircraft, I glanced over at the commercial terminal and saw people on the tarmac being herded onto a BA flight also destined for London. It dawned on me that there were almost certainly people getting on that flight who would happily pay that bit extra to be in the back of our CJ2. Since the operator incurs almost exactly the same cost whether an aircraft is flying empty or with people, it was clear that money was being left on the table. That was, if you like, the starting point for Stratajet, although we have evolved considerably since then.
On my return to Oxford, the first thing I did was search online to see if anyone was trying to sell empty legs, and I was met with a plethora of start-ups purporting to do exactly that. These websites seemed relatively basic and relied on charter companies going out of their way to supply them with empty leg information and then publishing these lists on a webpage. Furthermore they had very limited search functionality, and even the best sites still required a phone call to get any sort of reliable price. Upon discussing this with a number of charter company CEOs I learnt that the inefficiency of this existing system means that the majority of the (few) empty leg flights that operators actually do manage to fill typically come from existing customers rather than through such sites.
It got me thinking. Why are these websites so basic? Why are 40% of private jet flights in Europe still flown with no one on board? Why does the whole industry rely so heavily on using the telephone to get information when every other sector has embraced technology? Well, there are a number of reasons, but the largest contributing factor by far is the lack of integrated technology and therefore a lack of communication.
After months of research, it was pretty clear to me that to solve the empty leg problem we would need to solve many of the other inefficiencies in the industry. Pricing, scheduling and operational information needed to be consolidated in one place to have any chance of improving the private jet booking experience.
Full Circle
The fruits of our labour culminate in Stratajet.com, where private jet customers will be able to hire private aircraft. Travellers, or their PAs, will be able to see accurate prices for a trip instantly and book all the affiliated services in one place.
Stratajet’s charter aircraft booking system does not search separately for empty legs or ordinary flights, it combines them into one easy-to-use price comparison website and simply gives an efficiency-saving if a dead leg has been utilised. This means that a potential customer needs only to check Stratajet.com in order to see all options available to them and can select and filter through a multitude of different aircraft, airfields and budgets.
The Devil’s in the Detail
In order to be able to create a price-specific search engine, you obviously need to know prices, which in this industry is more complicated than it sounds. First you need to know the cost of the aircraft itself. Now, I’ll go into the details of how we got around issues surrounding aircraft costing (both the empty leg and new trip components) at a later date, as some of the computer science behind it really is interesting (albeit perhaps only to the more geeky reader). The remaining costs that need to be considered when pricing a trip are related to fuel, charges at airfields and handling. Until now, there has been no centralised platform where you can access such information, so we needed to build one.
Sounds simple doesn’t it: just gather the landing and handling fees. If only it were that easy. The problem is that airfields across Europe do not have a standardised way of charging for aircraft. Some charges are based solely on maximum take-off weight, but many of the bigger airfields have much more elaborate pricing structures. We’ve seen fees that vary depending on surface area, number of seats, date of certification, width of fuselage and for an increasing number of airfields, noise and emissions certification. The latter category can be broken down further (into nitrous oxide levels produced, noise on landing, flyover and climb) and factors are then often logarithmically balanced. It gets even more complicated when you add the variables of time of the day, day of the week, season, bank-holidays, etc. The reality therefore is that the building of this solution (what we call the Stratajet Airfield Pricing Engine) has turned out to be one of the most complicated software projects any of us has ever worked on.
And this is just one of many modules we have had to build. At some stage I will go into the nitty- gritty details on some of our other functions: such as our routing algorithms, handling modules, crew flight time limitations… the list goes on and on and on.
The Industry’s Woes
It seems to me that the lot of a charter company CEO is not a particularly pleasant one at the moment. They are constantly being squeezed on charter prices, increased legislation and a shrinking customer base. In order to achieve our overall vision, we quickly realised that we would first have to help improve key aspects within the industry itself. Our Stratafleet product is our attempt to do exactly this. In tech start-up vernacular Stratafleet would be described as an Inventory Management System, but to our industry it is essentially a fleet management and quoting tool. Our aim with Stratafleet is twofold: 1) to enable us to have real-time aircraft schedules; and 2) to give us access to accurate aircraft pricing. However, once we began working closely with charter companies, it became clear that Stratafleet could service a number of other requirements too. So we are able to draw on our technology to build other modules, which can help improve productivity and save resources both from a sales and an operational point of view, so as to better serve their customers. Stratafleet will continue to be developed, adding new modules to our web-based dashboard, as we identify new components that charter companies would like us to add. I suspect it will be one of those web-apps that is constantly evolving.
Funding
Many people have asked about how we raised the substantial funding required to spend two years researching and developing without revenue. We could have gone to market much sooner, but with a product with so much potential to revolutionise an industry, I felt it was important that we got it right so that people would have faith from the beginning. Without going into specifics we are fortunate to be backed by individuals who have understood the problems with the industry purely from the customer point of view, and want to see them fixed. This is a fundamental principal behind Stratajet: that everything we are building is responding to a requirement of the end user, with a view to benefiting them directly. After all, these are the people who keep our industry turning over.
EBACE 2013
We’ll be demonstrating the live Stratajet product at EBACE 2013 at Geneva Palexpo on 21st - 23rd May 2013. Initially it will only feature aircraft from our Stratafleet beta testers which are all based around London, but we envisage this coverage will grow exponentially in the months following the show. We also hope to be unveiling the prototype of project Stratatracer which I will tell a little more about nearer the time. If you are going to the show then please do head over to stand 673 in the main hall (Hall 6) to have a play on the systems and meet some of the team that have made all of this happen.
Jonathan Nicol