Aliya Ladhabhoy
As the world is slowly inching out of the lockdown, weekend getaways and short vacations are on the rise. After spending months indoors, Indians can’t wait to get out and holiday again.
As a result, leisure travel through private, chartered planes is booming. Kanika Tekriwal, CEO & Founder of JetSetGo Aviation shares that they are seeing a 30-40 per cent revival of their pre-COVID business. “This is a silver lining if we look at the rest of the industries,” says an optimistic Tekriwal.
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They are currently getting requests for, both, business and leisure travel. “Most of our business comes from business travel, however, we are seeing more requests coming in for leisure travel. People have started to travel again, which is a good sign for the industry,” Tekriwal informs. The private charter company has been receiving one query, every two days for a flight to a holiday destination.
The aviation company counts corporate houses, HNIs, Bollywood production houses and sports persons among their regular clients. On being asked to profile her current customers, she says that families and individuals who want to go to safe destinations, uncrowded destinations, account for a chunk of their passengers.
Read about the safety measures that JetSetGo is taking, here.
Goa, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan top the list of travel destinations within the country. Requests to travel to Dubai, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand are also on the rise.
“Out of 20 inquiries that we receive in a day, 70 per cent is from first-time private jet flyers,” Tekriwal points out. From the total number of requests that they get, they are able to translate 40 per cent of it into flights; of which 40 per cent is from brokers and aggregators.
“As safety is a priority for everyone in these times, we are mostly getting bookings for the entire aircraft. However, we do have empty legs available for various sectors where the cost is much lesser in comparison,” shares Tekriwal.
Most of the planes in operation are Hawker 750, Hawker 850 XP, Citation XLS (8 seater), Falcon 2000 (9 seater) and King Air B200 (6 seater).
While they offer customised and personalised services to guests, catering services have been stopped until further notice to maintain high safety standards.
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