Joe Moeggenberg and his company, Levo Aero, are hoping to disrupt the charter aircraft space. His idea is simple on paper: create a more streamlined online user interface to assist those looking to purchase a charter flight.
“There have been a lot of companies that have tried this and what makes us different is that, first of all, we're very cautious as far as growth. We’ve been very careful not to add a bunch of operators without having the critical mass of aircraft into the system,” Moeggenberg said. “So what we do that's different is we integrate with the charter operators’ flight scheduling system. We have an integration to an API. So we know what aircraft are available.”
Moeggenberg is cautious against comparisons to traditional commercial booking websites like Kayak or Trivago, but it's difficult to avoid the comparison. In a demonstration given to AIN, the company showed how a customer could enter in their departure airport and destination through a beta mockup of its website and receive a list of charter operators using the Levo technology and their prices. The Levo API can also be integrated into charter operators’ own websites.
“A customer can just go ahead and book it, and it puts the customer directly in contact with the aircraft operator. There's no broker in between,” he said.
Moeggenberg is quick to note that this technology is not intended to completely remove brokers from the charter experience. “I want to make this clear because we also work very closely with the broker community. Brokers are still an important part of this industry, especially for people that are new to chartering or [if] you're using private aircraft,” he said, “It's just that the more sophisticated charter user really wants to go direct to the operator. They want to shorten the lines of communication.”
Moeggenberg said that the public-facing site will be accessible through subscriptions that are focused mostly at the enterprise level, with a fare he estimates at around $5,000 to $10,000. “The operator isn't going to be inundated with requests from college kids looking to spend spring break at Cabo,” he said.
The technology is also able to integrate with scheduling software platforms Avianis and Airplane Manager. According to Moeggenberg, there are currently about “a hundred and some” airplanes that are integrated with the platform across different operators. “We really need to have at least that many, if not more, to have a critical mass to make sure that we have good coverage,” he said.
Moeggenberg attributes his attention to operational efficiency to his time as the founder of his previous venture, aviation risk management company Argus International.
“I started Argus back in 1996, primarily because I realized that in the aviation industry, people were making multimillion-dollar decisions—especially on aircraft acquisitions and so forth—without really good data. You know, they were buying aircraft based on manufacturers' estimated operating costs, which were just nowhere near the actual operating costs. When Argus started doing our first product, it was a benchmarking process where we collected data from corporate flight departments and benchmarked within peer groups. What that did is we collected all this really good operating cost data, so we knew what airplanes actually cost to operate.”