For our Perspectives series, we talk to experienced business aviation industry professionals who share with us their individual insights and offer a window into their world. This month's interviewee is Yann-Guillaume Jaccard, CEO and co-founder of Swiss organisation Simply Jet. The company's new broker jet card concept seems to be a hit with operators.

“We had a strong year in 2020, and it’s still the same 2021. Since we were founded in 2016, our objective has been to grow at a rate of nore than 50 per cent per year, compounded annually. This happened from 2019-2020 and it’s going to happen again this year. Right now we have a team of 21 people located in Switzerland and the UK. We opened our UK office in Farnborough in October last year. In March 2022 we are going to recruit approximately 13 people that will be dispatched between the Swiss office and the UK office. The UK office team size will go from three to six or seven people, and the rest of the team will be in Switzerland.

We are launching a jet card product, because there was a lot of demand from our customers to add this to our product line. A lot of the traditional jet card providers right now are facing a lot of difficulties providing aircraft within their fleet: it’s the case for NetJets and for Flexjet. They are doing well and they are great businesses, but it is working so well that they don’t really have enough aircraft any more for their fractional owners and jet card clients. We felt that a broker jet card, using a select inventory of key operators whom we like to work with on an ad hoc charter basis, could be used for jet card products. This has been in the making for almost 18 months, and the project should go live on our website very soon.

We wanted to be based in the UK because we wanted to be closer to our customer base from a service standpoint. We are aware that the UK is very often, if not always the first or second largest market in terms of clients, in Europe. We had the opportunity to open that office, and we really wanted to be there on the ground and able to do more client-facing meeting and welcoming clients at the airport. It’s important for us to find and recruit British talent in the Greater London area, as opposed to people needing to relocate. I think we are going to hire quite a lot of native people in our next recruitment batch. We offer the highest levels of service regardless of location.

The system allows us to choose the aircraft that is best suited to the mission, based on a number of categories. Operators are always happy to receive calls where there is basically a guaranteed flight, and it’s a flight where we have the ability to sign and pay the operators immediately after confirmation, because we already have all the legal and financial guarantees from the client side locked in, ready to go.

The European market is in good shape, and the latest data is putting it at around 20 or 30 per cent up on pre-COVID levels. This is a real sign of the vitality of the market. I believe a lot of new clients tested the product and service during the COVID phase when there was no other solution, or when they were no longer feeling confident with commercial aviation. I think these people will stay – there is no reason for them to return to commercial aviation.”