Air Partner has extended assistance to employees of failed competitors FlightTime Inc and FlightTime International Limited, which recently ceased trading. “FlightTime bet on the dot com and we watched them closely for three or four years. We concluded that either they were working on something that was revolutionary and would leave us miles behind or more likely they were selling $10 bills for $8, in which case they were storing up a load of liability,” said Air Partner md David Savile.

FlightTime personnel in the UK, mainland Europe and throughout the US will be accommodated via five new offices and an expansion of Air Partner’s City of London office in the Canary Wharf Tower. “We stayed close to FlightTime to see what the outcome would be. We felt it was prudent to have occasional meetings to discuss the industry and stay close, so we were aware when things started going wrong,” explained Savile.\r

Among those moving to Air Partner is Phil Mathews who was general manager of FlightTime’s core global broking operation. “FlightTime were respected competitors and we saw some very good quality people in the company. It’s still not confirmed how many people are coming, but brokerage is a people business and customers want to have a relationship with someone they trust,” said Savile.

EBAN asked Savile where he thought FlightTime had gone wrong: “It was publicly known that FlightTime sought venture capital in the dot com era to try and turn charter broking into something that was done over the internet. They believed to do it properly you needed a huge amount of investment in software and a huge amount of promotion – I think the figures are something like $35 million in two years on both. This compares to around two and half to three years of our entire group overhead, doing no deals at all. I think in its previous state, you could have run FlightTime for five to seven years on this amount of money.”

The question begs whether the market has really responded to internet brokerage. Savile said: “I think brokerage is a little like choosing a lawyer – you go for professional advice. If you’re a PA for a company chairman anywhere in the world, are you going to set up his itinerary and put him on a private jet without talking to someone? Aircraft charter is expensive by any standards and therefore we find it difficult to imagine why someone would choose to become impersonal via the web.

“One of the lessons of the dot coms is that you can make a lot of things work but often you have to throw disproportionate amounts of money at it compared with the extra revenue it will produce. I have little doubt that FlightTime increased their chartering through the work they did, but it just cost them too much to do that.”

Air Partner has now brought forward its original expansion plans to coincide with the arrival of these additional employees. “We open two or three new offices every year, but what we hadn’t bargained on was carrying out all our American expansion in one year. What would have occurred over 2003-4 is now being done straight away.

“This is because these are good quality employees who won’t need training and hopefully it will be refreshing for them, because they will be able to work for a solid financial company in Air Partner.

“We can be accused of being boring, but at least we’re stable.

We’ve survived forty years and my job as md is to ensure we survive another forty years. FlightTime had a different strategy and no doubt, had it worked, they would have reinvented the wheel and left the rest of us behind,” said Savile.

“I’m not sure why people think it’s necessary to reinvent our business, this is a simple and straight forward industry.

“The press has manifestly explained that chartering is half the price of these fractional or block hour schemes and I’m not sure why customers feel it necessary to spend twice as much on the same product. With FlightTime there are probably customers who bought 200 hours, paid up front and are now going to have to try and recover their money from the liquidators,” he said.