Digital charter booking specialist, JetZen is launching an “industry first” membership including annual charter spend offsetting through a profit-sharing initiative.
The “industry-first” membership initiative is targeted at the experienced charter flyer, JetZen founder and CEO Eric Jantzen says the membership will see most value for customers flying 100 hours or more per year. As well as the ability to profit-share, members of the new programme will have access to discounted charter rates and guaranteed availability.
“I always thought if I was going to be flying private, this is exactly what I would have wanted to see,” Jantzen tells CJI. “Private flyers who are hitting over 100 hours per year, they know what planes meet their mission types and they don’t want to be sold something differently. They just want to know where they’re going to go and what time they need to be there. They prefer a system that really streamlines the booking process, none of this jumping from email to text messages to WhatsApp to signing on DocuSign.
“Our goal was to break from the pack and deliver a membership program of true value to real private jet flyers.”
JetZen has rolled out a feature within its program that promptly notifies members of any associated empty legs with their charter trips. Members can then opt to monetise these legs or leave them unoccupied, with all proceeds evenly split 50/50 and issued to the member in the form of flight credits.
“Traditionally, clients are unaware of the repositioning flights, or ‘empty legs’, associated with their charters,” says Jantzen. “Brokers and jet card programs tend to conceal this information, subsequently profiting from reselling these flights at a fraction of the market cost. We believe this practice is not right. If an empty leg exists because of a paying customer, we firmly believe that the customer is entitled to a share of the profits generated from its sale.”
Founded in 2022, the JetZen team has spent the past two years building all its systems in-house, including a booking tool, sourcing mechanism and CRM system.
“We built the system from the ground up. It’s all ours. We have built APIs to feed into operator scheduling software. I have amazing business partners, Muhammet Sivri and Adam Jay, these guys used to build software for Fortune 500 companies and helped to revolutionise the business-to-business insurance landscape.”
Since completion, Jantzen says his life as a broker has changed, becoming “much easier”. Typically, the workflow for brokers involves feeding a long list of requests from clients. A broker might get 10 requests a day and have to reach out to five operators for each request. That is 50 conversations for between five and 10 trips.
“Our system allows you to organise all the conversations based on each trip request. You can pool all of the contracts and just click and drag them over to wherever needed. Then you present options to the client via email, or on the app accessible with any mobile device or computer. When they select an option, the broker gets a notification with what they need to sign. Once that is done, it automatically gets sent to the operator and then it turns into a trip.”
The system is also adept at dealing with the fallout in the event of an aircraft grounding (AOG). “As soon as it happens, it’s just a process. You click a button, it takes all the backup solutions that you’ve harvested from the proposal stage, and you’re off to the races. In those situations time is of the essence, and you can lose an option and a client, in a matter of minutes if you’re not doing the correct thing.”
Headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, JetZen has a global presence with additional offices in Los Angeles and a forthcoming location in Malta opening in the summer of 2024.
