BARON AVIATION LAUNCHES BOOKMYCHARTERS
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Baron Aviation, a private charter company, has launched BookMyCharters, an online platform to book private jets. Presently, the company has tied-up with 12 private charter operators with a total strength of 40 aircrafts. The company is currently looking to tap the domestic market and soon plan to expand to the international charter business.
Speaking about the launch, Rajeev Wadhwa, Chairman and CEO, Baron Aviation said, “On an average, the charter utilisation in India is 300 to 400 hours, as compared to 800-100 hours globally. India is a market which is yet to be tapped in a big way. With a new aggregator for private charters, there will be awareness amongst the consumers and also an easy and transparent system for all charter bookings. All put together, today India is an 1800 crore market for charter business; with this new platform we expect the market to grow up to 5000 crore by 2020. This platform will help to bring the charter owners and users on a single platform. By the end of this month we will have a total of 50 aircrafts listed on our website.”
“The current aircrafts which we have can cover all the Indian destinations. Currently, we don’t have international coverage, but very soon we will look into this segment. The biggest challenge in India is that air charters are not marketed properly. Through this platform this can be solved and we expect that around 30 per cent of clients will be new customers. In the last three to four years, the air charter market in India was stagnant,” added Wadhwa.
BookMyCharters was conceptualised in September 2012, and Baron Aviation along with its in-house team of software developers developed this real time website. As of now the website is totally an investment of Baron Aviation.
Speaking about future plans, Pranav Parikh, Director, BookMyCharters said, “We are just like any other start-up, so far it has been a proprietary owned website. But in future we will surely look for series of fundings to further enhance our website. Our initial plan for the next 3-4 months is to penetrate into the Indian market. Very soon we will also introduce helicopters on our website. For the tour operators segment, we will conduct market research and come out with a few packages.”
Speaking about the initial challenges, Wadhwa said, “In India, air charter business has always been done in the traditional offline way. The owners used to get business through brokers or middleman. To convince these owners to join and bring all the operators on one online platform was a major challenge. The operators have showed faith on us and in coming times we will establish this platform as one of the most powerful marketplace.”