business travel.
Well it's changed dramatically in recent years and the trend of
combining business travel with leisure travel is on the rise.
Cheddars had adobo caught up with Andrew Collins
ceo of private jet company sentient jet on
a walk and talk to talk about this trend as well as the future of travel.
Take a look
Andrew first. Thank you so much for joining us. Sure. Absolutely.
I want to ask you about a word that I'm seeing a lot in the travel industry.
Leisure. What is bleacher and what is the shift that we're seeing?
Sobe leisure is a phrase that we've seen kind of come out of the pandemic
and what it really means is people
are combining business travel and leisure travel.
There's a lot of flexibility and how people can work now.
And there are a lot of tools like private aviation for example
that allow you to kind of manipulate time and so people are combining
their travels and putting them together so they might go for a trip,
you know, to Washington D. C. Or to Los Angeles or wherever
and they might extend it for a little bit of leisure.
So you're seeing the combination happen.
Well, I've never been in a private jet. Let's go inside.
What's your outlook for business travel in 2023?
So we have a lot of demand already pre sold.
So we see a great deal of flying in our forward projections. So
I'd imagine we'll see somewhere
Around 50,000 hours flown uh this year for for our business on the jet card side.
But if you look at what's happening for in commercial aviation right
now and you think about how the world is fully open now,
um I believe you're gonna see some significant growth with
business travel and like the term we just talked about,
you'll start seeing
a lot of different patterns emerge like leisure and such.
What demands do you see changing in the travel industry as we move forward?
So I think what we see is,
You know,
people want the consistency and the quality and they
want to know that they're flying with somebody safe,
that's kind of table stakes.
So you know,
we've invested millions of dollars in safety over almost a 25 year time frame,
but people are really looking, for you know that quality, that consistency,
you know,
they want to leave at an appropriate time that they choose and in the
last year or so private aviation has seen a surge in a real demand
where a lot of new entrants have come in and that has
really crowded a lot of places like where we are today,
Teterboro, how is the travel and hospitality industry changing its tech?
It's a great question. So
what you saw coming into the pandemic is for an example, McKenzie
Basically said that, you know, in the 1st 10 weeks of the pandemic,
you probably saw something like 10 years worth of adoption when it came to, you know,
on demand transactions and people getting used
to working with digital regardless of age.
So what we've seen and what we're seeing now is
probably 35-40% of our flight bookings are coming in digitally.
Um, so you're,
you're starting to see a segment of travel emerge where people can
do it themselves or they can be in control through their iphone.
They're used to the transaction right down to now. We work with them on text.
So I think you see it in hotels now where texting is very commonplace with the staff,
it's commonplace now in aviation and it's going to continue to
create
less friction in a customer journey.
What are your top predictions
for innovation when it comes to flight travel?
So we just talked about
digital is really important, right? And
knowing how to really deliver an end to end
experience where someone feels like they're in control.
But
Um, you're also gonna see a lot around sustainability.
So, sustainable aviation fuel is one that's really starting to emerge uh,
more so at the commercial level right now, but it's now coming into private.
Um, you're gonna see probably in the next 2-3 years
if you haven't already, the beetles start to come into play, which are the electric,
vertical takeoff and landing.
We recently got into vertical lift.
We bought two different helicopter companies,
one based here in new york city and one based in London
and we are ramping up operations to be part of that revolution
as it comes. And we've actually pre ordered 200 beetles. So
I think that's the next phase of travel,
that notion of short distance aviation and doing it with sustainability.
That was
an adobo with Andrew Collins ceo of sentient jet on their walk and talk.