Branson Starting Online Air Charter Service

Sir Richard Branson, Britain’s lively entrepreneur, has decided to get into the charter airline business. He’s starting an online service that allows owners and travelers to find one another. The idea isn’t all that original, but it is a growing niche in the travel world, and Sir Richard just might have another winner on his hands.

Virgin Charter’s website says, “Virgin Charter is made up of former NASA rocket scientists (for real) [Editor’s note: parentheses in original and not a Kensington Review smart alec remark], engineers, and razor–sharp business guys and gals from Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Expedia and more. With all this brainpower together in our California headquarters, we built a kick–#$%* [Note: they deleted their own expletives] system to help you seamlessly request, compare, book, and buy charter flights, all online.”

The website appears to be as easy to use as Expedia, Travelocity and other similar services. However, the charter plane business is a $30 billion a year industry that still uses brokers to match up supply with demand. This is potentially a revolution in chartering aircraft.

Virgin Charter will screen its operators to protect its brand, and it will begin with about 100 operators who handle 1,000 planes. This makes Virgin Charter an 800-pound gorilla in the space, where most brokers and marketing companies have only a handful of aircraft.

The ease of use and the larger fleet will allow Virgin Charter to cut as much as 20% off the cost of chartering an airplane. It will also speed the process up considerably. Currently, a fast chartering result is measured in days. Virgin Charter could make it happen in minutes. Faster, cheaper and better all start to make this thing look profitable from the start.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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