Charter operators can and do improve their businesses dramatically using the STACK.aero platform. But the company’s Cat Buchanan and Johan Segring reckon the real magic happens when it is integrated as part of a tech stack
STACK.aero is a digital platform for charter brokers and sales teams, charter operators and corporate flight departments. It places all the knowledge previously gathered and stored in spreadsheets, emails, personal memories and on the backs of envelopes, into a single platform where it is more efficiently and usefully applied to the business of managing charter sales.
That’s STACK.aero in a nutshell. But change the word ‘knowledge’ for ‘data’, and the platform’s true power begins to emerge. Cat Buchanan, Director of Business Development, explains:
“STACK.aero allows charter brokers and sales teams to build digital profiles of their customers and use digital tools to manage the customer relationship proactively. Sales in the analogue world are quite reactive – a customer comes to you, tells you they want something, and you help them with it. We want to foster a proactive sales environment, where the system analyses data to assess what a customer requires and when they need it. It anticipates their needs so the sales team can provided elevated service.
“Selling one trip is transactional, but selling repeated trips to the same customer requires account management and that’s part of what our solution helps manage. It replaces the kind of information that individual account managers typically hold, the absence of which, if they were unavailable on the day the client called, could easily lose the sale. For example, the system might recognise that a client flies to Monaco every year in April and provides the data the team needs to approach that client in January to begin the conversation.”
With STACK.aero providing continuity and enabling proactive sales, human charter sales agents are not replaced; rather, they have more time to pursue more sales opportunities. Buchanan illustrates the point from a charter broker’s perspective: “Putting a complex quote together in a document using traditional analogue techniques takes as long as an hour, while our system takes three or four clicks and two or three minutes to pull everything into one document. And the system self improves because it builds aircraft profiles just as it builds client profiles, as it ‘sees’ repeated tail numbers. If a quote requires a photograph of an aircraft previously used, the system automatically brings the photo in when it’s used again; the operator doesn’t need to go looking for it.”
The system learns customer preferences for items including catering, aircraft size and more, and learns aircraft data. If a client requires an aircraft equipped with Ka-band satcom for a transatlantic trip, STACK.aero will offer the broker only aircraft with suitable range and equipment. Buchanan says that as recently as 2007, when she entered the charter business, referencing aircraft data while compiling quotes often meant searching through printed lists. Compared to that arduous task, STACK.aero naturally reduces errors, but since any data-based system is only as good as the data it uses, fail-safes are incorporated to minimise the chances of errors.
Interestingly, while STACK.aero is a complete product that organisations buy and run, it can also be considered as a template for modification to individual use cases. Johan Segring, STACK.aero Solution Architect & Managing Partner, says the platform’s customers may loosely be divided into three categories. “Some customers buy the product and take their Excel/back-of-envelope operation to the next level, others dig a little deeper into the features and the ability to customise it for them, and then we have those for whom the sky’s the limit.”
With so many apps and digital platforms available to business aviation companies there is a danger that customers will become confused and that there might be more duplication in the market than healthy competition requires. But Buchanan says there are very high-quality platforms for quite different areas of business and notes that smart integrations provide customers with even greater efficiency. “We’re integrated with the Fl33x aviation management platform for example and hope to integrate with the MySky spend management system too; STACK.aero, Fl33x and MySky together make a very strong stack. We integrate with Avinode marketplace too.”
Buchanan advocates what she calls the value of a ‘tech stack’, integrating multiple best-in-class products from specialist developers into a system. “Ultimately, that means the customer gets the very best solution for their business, so it’s about simplifying the integration and telling the customer which other products will work well for them. Sometimes the best way of winning a customer is to make a joint approach because we know our systems together create the strongest possible solution for them. At STACK.aero we nurture a shared philosophy of integration and partnership. It’s a completely different approach to any other sector, where we work together more often than we compete.”