Introducing Deadlegs

Many small to midsize charter airline companies lack a robust infrastructure for facilitating booking, customer relationship management, and market visibility. Furthermore, many of these smaller companies struggle with the problem of empty leg flights, commonly referred to as deadlegs. These issues were discovered when speaking to a pilot during a short charter flight to the bahamas. He explained the issue of deadlegs and expressed the foolishness of it considering the immense amount of people and cargo that need to be transported between the two locations at any time. The inefficiencies are due to a logistical and visibility problem. Additionally, it was noticed while speaking with people who frequent this charter company and others like it, that there is dissatisfaction with the process of booking and communication. The process of finding one of these smaller charter companies to book a flight in the first place is a struggle of its own. A simple google search along the lines of “charter flight from ‘location A’ to ‘location B’ often returns results from the largest private jet companies and after some scrolling smaller charter companies can only sometimes be found.

Larger private jet services have overcome these issues by developing their own proprietary software and web applications. This allows them to minimize the labor overhead of bookings, empty leg visibility, and customer relations. However, the small business still remains doing things the old, slow, and inefficient way. They rely on extensive email, phone, and in person communication to facilitate bookings. Many have websites featuring buggy, user-hostile interfaces that fail to accurately make their availability and services visible to the consumer. These small companies lack the robust market visibility needed to advertise and fill their empty legs, often placing the burden on the customer to fill the empty leg in turn for a discount on their booking. While larger private jet companies can leverage the scale of their operations to make trips more efficient and minimize their empty legs, the smaller operations are not afforded this same opportunity.

Our objective with this project is providing a new methodology to connect charters and passengers. Consumers can find companies that offer private jet empty leg flights, but when searching for empty legs or charter services serving at a cheaper price point they will often find poor UI/UX and a convoluted booking experience. The solution that the Deadlegs platform provides is that a plethora of companies can offer their services through the platform, and allow consumers access to cheaper charters than private jets. The project proposes solutions not only to passengers for cheaper flights and a better customer experience, but also to charter companies. Small charter companies can enjoy tools similar to those used by large private jet charter services and increase their total revenue by making money on flights that are inevitable but would typically make them nothing. Additionally, these extra flights have a negative environmental impact, but if they are inevitable, it at least provides a positive economic impact rather than having a complete waste of pollution. With this platform our objective is to bring the benefits that larger private charter companies experience due to their scale, to the smaller businesses. In turn increasing efficiency, profit, and improving customer experience.

Market analysis was done in order to determine if similar projects have been explored in the past. During research, it was found that a similar service has been attempted involving luxury private jets, but no companies have been found that offer empty leg bookings for smaller, cheaper cargo planes. The market for empty leg flights is completely diluted by these companies trying to sell cheaper access to private jets, and with weak implementation. Each of the sites explored had very poor UI/UX. The work being done on FlyDeadlegs is different because it provides consumers access to less significant charter planes, meaning less expensive and less environmental impact. It also provides access in a clean and user-friendly environment. Moreover, something that makes this site very different from the others is that it provides an interface to match third-party companies with consumers. Other companies are only offering empty leg flights from their own arsenal of aircraft. Through FlyDeadlegs, any charter pilot or company can utilize our web application to offer their services to the public. Additionally, they will be able to easily manage their services and revenue through the pilot business interface. They will be provided with tools that they would otherwise not have for being able to offer their services had they joined FlyDeadlegs.

Overall what we are proposing to remedy the problems facing the small charter businesses, is a web application providing a CRM, flight booking, and business management platform for smaller charter airline companies. The application will provide charter companies with powerful software that allows them to list flights, respond to booking requests, communicate with customers, and keep track of their scheduling. The application also provides many benefits to passenger users. It serves as a tool for finding charter companies able to facilitate a travel need, exposes empty leg flights that may be booked at a discounted rate, and makes the process of booking and communication much more convenient.

The expected outcome is that charter companies come to our platform as a solution to issues that their business is having, and passengers come to our platform as a solution for finding cheap charter flights and charter companies that match their needs. A solution is found for both parties. Beyond simply this outcome, charter companies may want to use our service to even post extra flights if their customer base and demand becomes large enough. A stretch outcome for passengers is that the pursuit of catching an empty leg flight or booking charter planes becomes much more standardized in the airline industry. Access to private flights could be provided for all people and not just constrained to people of high economic status. One more stretch outcome could be that companies with more expensive type flights, such as private jets, use our business tools to offer their services as another way to be able to market their company and for another point of sale. Although our application’s mission focuses on smaller companies, this could be a stretch goal. Previously, for both private jets and smaller charter planes, the companies have offered access to empty leg flights, and for a lot of companies all of their flights, through their own website and user interface. Having a third party company list their empty leg flights through a website designed to do so will heavily increase the odds of the empty leg being booked if the website‘s audience is large enough while also being convenient for the charter company, reducing tedious labor.