25 May 2020: COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the entire aviation industry thereby changing the norms and rules of air travel for many months to come. In the post COVID-19 phase where the flights are slowly starting to take-off, the market is found to be tilting in the favour of LLC’s rather than their bigger national counterparts. For e.g. Since last week Waltzing Matilda Aviation LLC (WMA) have been answering about 50 jet charter enquiries a day from just a couple of enquiries about two weeks back.
WMA CEO John Thomas feels with a massive imbalance in clients wanting to fly from Florida to the North East they are seeing unbelievably low pricing for one way southbound flights for as low as USD 6,500. He said, "We don't expect this imbalance will last for more than a couple of weeks after which southbound pricing will rise to their more normal levels."
Based on their level of activity at Bedford, business is coming to WMA faster than expected. One of the major reasons is said to be the forced furlough crews in the big national companies during downtime.
As WMA was able to maintain their entire staff during downtime, they were able to respond faster as the demand came up during recovery phase. They also invested in some new systems and has enhanced their new website with a new online booking portal.
Thomas further added, "With the FET holiday through to the end of December as well as low fuel prices, now is one of the cheapest times to fly privately. Further we have picked up a number of new corporate customers who have already made the decision not to allow their staff to fly commercially for the foreseeable future and therefore see private aviation as the only viable option."