NetJets Europe has reported a 27 per cent increase in flight bookings in recent weeks as owners react to war-related security concerns and fears over the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus. Chief executive Mark Booth said: “It’s difficult to determine exactly what is causing the increase in our business, but the feedback we’re getting indicates that some of the increase is stemming from travellers’ concerns about SARS. When travelling on NetJets aircraft, you’re only flying with people you invite on the aircraft, so the health risks are dramatically reduced.”

The statistics stemmed from a dinner the company’s director of communications, Charles McLean, recently had in Munich. He told EBAN: “I was chatting with one of the Munich pilots and he said that a guy he was flying from Munich to London wasn’t letting his wife fly commercial airlines at the moment due to the SARS outbreak. Another pilot then said that he had noticed we’d been busier recently.

“I called Lisbon and asked them to run some numbers on this and they came back saying that business had gone up by 27 per cent over the last couple of weeks, since SARS had been in the news.”

The additional hours are being flown by current owners, which McLean believes will precipitate an increase in shares over the next year. “If someone wants to fly more than their allotted hours, they’ll typically move from a sixteenth to an eighth of an aircraft. We were anticipating an increase anyway, but this outbreak could certainly contribute as owners use more of their hours now. I have no way of quantifying this, so it could be that passengers are afraid of terrorism. But it is of interest that as the SARS story has been building

in the European media, that we’ve seen this uptick.”

NetJets has been honouring the advisory it received from MedAire by not flying in and out of Hong Kong. McLean added: “Lisbon didn’t give me a breakdown in terms of where people are flying, but SARS is certainly an issue over in the US and I suspect that this is affecting flights all over the world. It’s definitely affecting flights to Canada. Commercial aviation is being fingered as an

agent of transmission in this instance and this is concerning a number

of people. I would hasten to say

that while this may not be a bad thing for our business, it’s a terrible thing for the industry and I just hope this will end soon.”

McLean believes that people who traditionally use their hours for business use may now be provoked into also using them for private use. “A very typical scenario is that when a businessman’s wife flies privately she might not want to go back to flying commercially. In fact it’s part of the reason why Warren Buffett came to own this business. Berkshire Hathaway had it’s own aircraft and Warren was famously embarrassed about owning a private aircraft and buried it at the bottom of the annual reports to the company’s shareholders.

\rHis wife wanted to fly on the aircraft but he wouldn’t allow it and so bought some shares in NetJets. She then told him that it was better than flying on the company aircraft, so after trying NetJets himself, he sold the company aircraft and took something like 800 hours of NetJets time. Warren later told Richard Santulli that if he ever wanted to sell the company to let him know, which led to Warren becoming our owner in 1998.