California-based fractional operator Surf Air is bringing its all-you-can-fly membership service to Europe, beginning in October. It will focus on key European hubs such as London, Cannes, Zurich and Geneva.

"We have found, in the three years that we have been running our business in the US, that there is a strong appetite among frequent travellers for the subscription model where they pay a fixed and predictable amount every month to fly," says CEO Simon Talling-Smith. "There are large numbers of those people who want to benefit as regular travellers from the time saving that Surf Air offers them; typically two hours each way on the journeys they are making every week.

"When we looked at Europe, we saw that it was a big market, significantly bigger than California, and had a large number of cities with people travelling between them on a regular basis. They were between one and two hours apart, which is perfect for us.

We could see when we looked at the existing commercial flying population of Europe that they are having the same frustrations that our clients in California were having before we started up. Airports are becoming bigger and more congested, more frustrating, people were fed up with standng in line again and again. If you do that once or twice a week, it becomes incredibly frustrating. We believe that we can take the success of the model in California and do it again on a bigger scale in Europe."

The company only had to adjust its strategy a little for Europe, using a jet for some of the longer legs rather than the PC-12 it deploys in California. The first routes it will operate are London to Geneva, Zurich and Cannes, and then connect Cannes to Geneva and Zurich before moving on to Dublin and Paris.

"We will be using eight seat light jets for these missions," continues Talling-Smith. "We are currently finishing a procurement competition between the Learjet 75, the CJ4 and the Phenom 300. All three of those are great aircraft, but we haven't quite made a final decision to award the four-year contract yet.

"We have a good indication that there is already a lot of demand, particularly in Switzerland, and we have been deluged with interest from there since the announcement. People can also put down a deposit to ensure that they secure membership as soon as we start flying their chosen routes. This way we can steer our routes towards those locations that people have already expressed an interest in."