Baron Aviation Launches Private Jet Aggregator, BookMyCharters

By Rashmi Pradhan IN ORDER to offer a simplified and hassle free online charter booking, Baron Aviation has launched BookMyCharters, an advanced and user friendly online platform to book a private jet in less than 60 seconds. BookMyCharters is a unique and innovative offering for online charter booking that enables customers to transact on a real time basis. Currently, the platform has got its acceptance from more than 12 operators who have listed over 40 Aircraft covering 149 airports till date with five more operators and 10 Aircrafts in pipeline to be listed by the end of month. The technology behind the platform is proprietary and patents for this innovation have been filed. Rajeev Wadhwa, Chairman and CEO, Baron Aviation, (see photo) said, ’Behind the simple and user friendly customer interface is a robust proprietary technology platform that automates several manual processes and crunches multiple variables through our advanced algorithms to reduce the entire process of searching and quoting an aircraft to less than a minute.’ According to Wadhwa, ’Aggregation of aircraft inventory and their neutrality towards all aircraft owners will help to evolve BookMyCharters as an integrated market place that will bring Indian charter industry to the global canvas with far more credibility, faith, transparency and service quality that will match global standards.’ BookMyCharters is an alternative to the offline model. Currently in an offline model customer gets limited choice of aircraft and it takes anywhere between two hours to 48 hours to generate a quote. With BookMyCharters, the customer can now book a private jet with in as much time and ease as he books a normal commercial airline ticket online. ’BookMyCharters management believes that it will be able to migrate 30-40 per cent of current air charter users to the platform within the first year of its operations. It also expects to grow the existing market by 30 per cent, bringing in new customers especially from non metro cities and international travelers who can now book and pay online. We plan to integrate over 60 per cent of the Indian private aircrafts over next 8-12 weeks,’ added Wadhwa. ’By launching BookMyCharters we want to corporatize the General Aviation industry in India by aggregating Aircraft inventory and consolidating customers and thus bringing in the highest level of professionalism and transparency in Air Charter industry. The total charter market amounts to Rs 1800 crore and is expected to grow to Rs 5,000 crore by 2020,’ stated Wadhwa. BookMyCharters is an aircraft aggregation platform where one window offers widest choice of available aircrafts providing instant quotes and not estimates. It also offers an option to select an aircraft from off base; bookings and payments are made online and booking confirmation can be received instantaneously. BookMyCharters is a globally scalable platform and is geared to address the USD 20 billion global opportunity. The platform is a substitute to high value private jet ownership and is disruptive to most popular current aircraft chartering options like fractional ownership and jet card programs. The company endeavors to be a global player in the air charter market and reach out to mature markets like America and Europe and emerging markets like Africa in the coming years, either directly or by engaging partnerships with local players.