Jet Linx's Jamie Walker talks:
- Entering the New York market
- Changing patterns in payment
- New flight-sharing app
Private aviation company Jet Linx recently opened its 18th base location, a private terminal at northern New Jersey's Teterboro Airport, as part of its ongoing expansion in the Northeast. The company's model differs from other private aviation firms in that it both manages airplanes for corporate clients and private individuals and sells availability on those aircraft in the form of a jet card when the owners are not using them. President and CEO Jamie Walker said Jet Linx's terminals, such as the new Teterboro location, are part of "the uniqueness of the model in not only providing a local, private terminal with local client service representatives but also the ability to fly local airplanes with local pilots." Walker spoke with BTN transportation editor Michael B. Baker about the new location, private aviation demand trends and a new flight-sharing option launched earlier this year.
BTN: What has been your recent growth strategy?
Walker: We started 20 years ago in Omaha, Neb., and developed this concept. Over the course of the last 20 years, we've built out 18 locations. We opened New York, Boston and Chicago just in this past year, because we've moved into some more major markets. We just opened our Teterboro location a month ago, which turned out beautiful. Now that we're in the Northeast, and we have a D.C. location, we're focusing on opening markets in the Southeast, in Florida. We're still in the deciding stage. We're looking at Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach, the usual suspects, but we haven't quite decided which of those markets we'll enter into first.
BTN: Do you have a sense of your mix of business versus leisure travel?
Walker: It's a little hard to track, because a lot of the business clients we have are entrepreneurs that own their own companies, so they'll travel for both. It's hard to peg which are business trips and which are leisure trips, and I'm not sure they want us to peg that for them. By our count, just from the names of the entities that we serve, over half of them are leisure travelers, but the 40 or 45 percent that are business, they fly much more. From a total volume standpoint, our business clients are about 60 percent of our demand, even though by our count, there are more leisure travelers.
BTN: What has been the demand trend for private aviation?
Walker: Ever increasing. It looks very similar to the stock market.
BTN: Are there things beside the economy driving it?
Walker: That's primary. There's just a lot of activity. We've started to get into this over the course of last year. There's a lot more road shows now, which happens when markets are good. When markets are down, not a lot of IPOs are happening, and therefore, there's not a lot of road shows.
BTN: Has the network growth driven demand as well?
Walker: Yes. We've been signing up both managed aircraft clients as well as air card clients last year, as we build toward the opening of our brick-and-mortar private terminal piece. During our grand opening, one of our aircraft owners flew in from L.A. during the party—a pretty good entrance—and I spent a few minutes with him. He immediately was, "Now I get it, the differentiator in what you offer and the other options I was considering, and I can't wait to tell my friends." About 70 percent of our business comes through referrals and word of mouth. Now that we're open and we have a stage to perform from and serve the client in a meaningful way, we're starting to see an uptick in those referrals.
BTN: Which aspect has been growing faster: cards or ownership?
Walker: Cards are much more popular. When you get into aircraft ownership, it narrows the population who could cost-justify it, so the jet cards grow much quicker, which is good for the model. One airplane can satisfy dozens of jet card clients. We're the second-largest operator today in the United States with 115 airplanes, and we have 2,300 jet card clients.
BTN: Have you made any tweaks to the card structure?
Walker: We launched our jet card program and aircraft management program in 2004. The jet card program has evolved over time. We started off as a deposit program, where you put money on an account and burn it off. As the market matured and the consumers' needs changed, they started to say, especially during the recession, "I'd rather keep my money in my pocket rather than put these big upfront deposits with you." We changed and created a program where they join the membership program and can pay as they go. We're now seeing that consumer need shift, and they want to put money on an account because they know they're going to fly this way.
BTN: Any other new recent offerings?
Walker: In July, we introduced an opportunity for our clients to share flights. If they want to sell any of their empty seats to other members in the organization, they can sell empty seats on their flights. It's all done through an app, and we've seen a lot of nice traction to that. The way we've approached it, because there are other models that have done per-seat-type programs, our program is more than the standard membership to join. It's an additional fee to join and add that to your account, because we want to make sure that we preserve the integrity of the peer-to-peer relationship. We're not trying to democratize what we're doing, we're trying to personalize what we're doing. We're not trying to lower the bar to a new audience but provide a new benefit to our current audience.