Business aviation spend management platform MySky this week introduced a predictive feature called Quote that it says will rapidly generate accurate pricing for charter flights. According to the company, the MySky Quote feature will give flight costs to charter operators and their clients that are accurate more than 96 percent of the time. It says that estimates for each leg of a charter trip will be available in less than 10 seconds.
Two years after launching its spend management platform, the Switzerland-based company reports that it now has sufficient real-world operational data covering every aspect of private aircraft charter operations, allowing it to produce precise cost estimates for trips. “Initially with our spend management solution, we were analyzing the past and trying to streamline the present with tools to make it [aircraft operations and ownership] easier, but now we have so much data that we can really predict the future,” MySky co-founder and global strategy director Christopher Marich told AIN. “A lot of charter quoting has been done using only averages and estimates.”
MySky says that the Quote application can be integrated with flight scheduling platforms or used as a stand-alone product, and it has a live feed integrated with the Avinode and Flexx charter marketplace platforms. It is currently available for customers in Europe but will be offered in the U.S. in late 2021.
The Quote system assesses all costs, such as overflight air traffic control fees, fuel purchases, ground handling, aircraft parking, hotels, crew per diems, ground transportation, maintenance reserves, and catering. It can also project the profit margin the aircraft owner or operator will get from the trip to help them determine whether a booking is worthwhile.
“The system does in 20 seconds what it would take [a human] three hours to do by collecting all the separate costs, and using averages can be a dangerous game,” Marich explained. He said that due in part to the excessive workload associated with manually preparing charter flight quotes, operators and brokers are currently converting just over 1 percent of charter requests into sales.
The price for using MySky Quote is based on a monthly flat-rate fee of €90 ($106), which includes 100 flight requests. Above that amount, users are charged €1 per transaction.
Earlier this year, MySky introduced a Budget tool to help aircraft owners and operators more accurately calculate and analyze their overall annual costs. By harnessing data about multiple operating costs it has collected since launching its main artificial intelligence-based spend management tool, the company is generating accurate projections that enable clients to develop meaningful budgets and maintain greater control over expenses.
“The past year has seen a huge increase in demand for aircraft charter as more people realized the value of private aviation,” said MySky co-founder and CEO Kirill Kim. “With some operators receiving over 100 requests per aircraft per day, manually responding to all of them became impossible. With MySky Quote we enable our clients to be more reactive, more accurate, and more competitive, resulting in more bookings and a higher return on investment for each flight.”