Executive travel
NetJets has seen an unprecedented demand for private travel, with a 350% increase in demand for new ownership.
“NetJets has seen an unprecedented demand for private travel in 2020, with a 350% increase in demand for new ownership compared with previous years,” says Patrick Gallagher, president of sales, marketing and service at NetJets.
“While leisure travel led the recovery in the US, business travel is now exceeding pre-pandemic levels,” Gallagher continues. “This trend has continued throughout 2021 so far, with our overall demand in July 2021 being 38% higher than in July 2019 and 92% higher than in July 2020. We project that this trend will continue through the remainder of the year, both in the US and in Europe.” Even more impressive, perhaps, is that the private jet segment has also managed to attract new passengers during the pandemic. Malta- headquartered private aviation company VistaJet, which operates a fleet of 73 business jets, reportedly had a 320% increase in new memberships in July 2020 compared with the same month the previous year. What’s more, 71% of the company’s incoming requests were from new passengers who didn’t use private jets regularly. NetJets has seen similar trends – between January and October 2020, the company saw three times as many new customers as the same period in 2019 – and has plans to expand accordingly. As Gallagher puts it: “With demand projected to stay the same throughout the rest of 2021, we will add more than 26 new private jets to our existing 760+ aircraft by the end of the year. Our plan calls for an additional 70 deliveries by the end of 2022.” More to the point, travel will always be necessary to some extent – major deals, trade fairs and conferences will always be better off conducted in person – and Deloitte predicts that US business travel spending will return to as much as 80% of its
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2019 level by the last quarter of 2022. In a similar vein, the same study also notes that nine out of ten companies surveyed expect their travel budgets will return to 75% of 2019 levels by the end of next year.
“With demand projected to stay the same throughout the rest of 2021, we will add more than 26 new private jets to our existing 760+ aircraft by the end of the year.”
Patrick Gallagher
Greener skies Yet despite its quick recovery, the executive travel segment is unlikely to return to business as usual. With many companies setting stricter emissions targets, and cutting corporate flights in favour of Zoom calls and local meetings, demand has taken a permanent hit. In September, for example, Zurich Insurance announced it would be cutting emissions generated from employees’ flights by 70% from pre- pandemic levels in order to meet the company’s sustainability goals. A month earlier, Mars announced it planned to slash corporate travel by 50%, or 145,000 flights. This is only likely to continue: research by Deloitte recently found that, in the next 12 months, 58% of companies surveyed plan to reduce the frequency of business travel, 67% expect to optimise meeting agendas to reduce the need to fly and 76% will be transitioning to more internal meetings online.
In other words, it may become more difficult for executive jet companies to keep existing customers, let alone attract new ones, if they don’t change the way they operate. Given the rise of ‘flight shaming’, to say nothing of the Intergovernmental Panel on
The number of companies that expect their travel budgets to return to 75% of 2019 levels by the end of 2022.
Deloitte 41
90%
4AIR
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