Private aviation

A private aviation client is buying the removal of an airport. Everything the product promises happens in the ninety minutes around the flight rather than in the air: the quote answered in twenty minutes or in two days, the terminal that is easy or impossible to find, the person who is or is not standing at the door with a name.

The aircraft itself is the least variable part of it. Cabins are specified, catering is ordered, and the safety of it is not in question — so the experience is decided almost entirely on the ground, by a handling agent you may not employ, by the crew’s first ten seconds, and by what happens the moment anything moves.

And something always moves. A slot slips, weather closes, a passenger is late. How a change is communicated — by whom, how early, with what alternative already arranged before the client had to ask for one — is the actual product, and it is the one thing no brochure has ever described.

• Operators and brokers whose clients experience the ground handling as entirely theirs.
• Anyone whose quotes are answered by several people working to no shared standard.
• Charter businesses whose reputation turns on how a bad day was handled rather than a good one.

• How the enquiry and the quote were handled, and how quickly.
• What arrival at the terminal was like for somebody who had not been there before.
• How a change was communicated, and what had been arranged before the client had to ask.
• What a client recalled three days later about a movement that went entirely to plan.