While the airline industry continues to be heavily impacted by Covid-19, private aviation appears to have been largely immune to the pandemic by comparison. Thomas Haynes spoke with Ian Moore, VistaJet’s chief commercial officer, to find out more
The situation for the airline industry over the past 24 months has been stark. The sector, which relies on an open and accessible world to function properly, has had continuous difficulties since the beginning of the pandemic.
In the time since, progress has been made towards recovery with some regions and market segments faring better than others. For business aviation, however, the story has been a little different.
“From about May [2020] we started to see an upturn in flights, obviously the commercial aviation market being completely decimated created a new opportunity for the private aviation market,” said Ian Moore, chief commercial officer at VistaJet. “From that point onwards, we’ve seen a huge [number] of new entrants into the industry from a customer perspective and we’ve just been going leaps and bounds from that particular point.” Moore said the company – which operates a fleet of more than 70 private jets – had to adapt its operations to fit within the Covid-19 restrictions.
According to the executive, a McKinsey report published pre-pandemic, stated that only 10% of the people who could afford to fly privately actually did so.
“What Covid has done is it’s accelerated the 90% of people that had the means but weren’t doing it previously to try the industry,” Moore explained. “We know once we have the person inside the cabin and they’ve enjoyed the experience… that we’re going to keep them.
“We had a rare opportunity as an industry and as a company to be able to showcase what we can do… mainly because of commercial aviation really being decimated.”
Will the business aviation boom last?
“I think it will,” Moore replies. “Even if only 50% of it lasted, the industry would be significantly better off, it’s a huge accelerator having all these people who weren’t flying privately but had the means [to] now flying privately.”
Moore also highlighted the demise of first-class amongst the world’s airlines over recent years and said that this could help push customers over to the private aviation sector too.
“There’s a lot of talk now about [carriers] changing the first-class services across the airlines, that will have an impact on the private jet market,” he explained. “Having the privacy, having the less touchpoints, being able to take off and land wherever you want, we’ve just had the chance to showcase that to so many more people in the last 18 months so I think on a positive side that will probably be one of Covid’s lasting impacts on private aviation.”
Moore says that while the two sections of aviation compete for the most lucrative customers, they can work together in some ways. He highlights that some of his company’s customers take commercial flights to pick up private jets as an example.
Despite this, he concludes that the situation has “swung towards private aviation for now”, particularly in the higher end of the market.
