Sentient Jet doubled its jet card sales in 2020 due almost exclusively to new private fliers entering the market and expects other trends that emerged last year to continue into this year and beyond, CEO Andrew Collins told AIN. “With the new entrants, with the rise of the popularity of the jet card model in 2020, and then you couple the fact that we had grown our organization from a sales perspective and additionally there was the federal excise tax holiday, we ended the year selling $450 million in jet cards,” Collins said. “So that’s a pretty significant jump from where we were the year before.”
Following the emergence of Covid-19 in the U.S. early last spring, “volume fell through the floor,” Collins said, and “we really wondered where the business would head.” But later in the spring, the company noted a rise in demand from clients who hadn’t previously purchased or used a jet card from Sentient, which he attributed to personal travelers seeking warm-weather destinations or locales where they could socially isolate from the pandemic, such as West Palm Beach, Florida, and Aspen, Colorado.
Traditionally, those new entrants account for a third of Sentient’s business. But the demand was such in 2020 that they accounted for two-thirds of its business. “I think anybody in the industry that had an experience with the rise…in new entrants, the real focus they’re going to have to be in tune to is retaining this new user base in 2021 and beyond,” Collins noted.
Two trends have emerged from the pandemic that Collins thinks are here to stay. One is that personal travel trips are going to last longer, which he said Sentient noted last year. Specifically, what was once a four-to-six-day average stay for Sentient leisure clients increased to eight to 12 days in 2020 (which the company determined by looking at the number of one-way rates used by its jet card clients versus two-way, or roundtrip, rates).
The other trend that emerged is the changing definition of home and why trips by personal travelers may last longer. Technology such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams has enabled more people to work or attend school virtually, which means they don’t have to always be tied to a certain location. “I think one thing the pandemic did is it redefined where home might be for somebody…and private aviation gives you more control over how to redefine that,” Collins explained.
Looking ahead, Collins expects business travel will return in 2021, but at a measured rate. “I would tell you that 90 to 95 percent of the travel we saw in 2020 was really derivative of personal travel,” he said. “That trend continues into 2021. My guess is you’ll start to see a slow return to business travel at the beginning of the second quarter and it really will be smaller teams that are more transactional oriented, doing due diligence or consultants, and you really won’t see a return to robust business flying [until] deeper into this year if not into 2022.”
Since December, Sentient has noted a “robust amount of flying” that Collins said has continued into January. He expects that also will continue into February. “And that’s traditionally the last of the winter peak months so we’re busy, we are hiring, and are looking forward to the expanded market share that happened in 2020.”