Wheels Up transitions into travel company

While its fleet of 119 King Air 350i, Hawker 400XP, and Cessna Citation Excel/XLS and Citation X aircraft represents the bulk of the company’s revenue, over the next few years that will shift. He sees the King Airs to Wheels Up as books were to Amazon in its early days. The turboprops are the assets that it leverages to make revenue, just as the book sales were Amazon’s first revenue source. But today book sales represent a tiny fraction of Amazon’s revenue. Instead, Amazon has leveraged its technology into all sorts of other businesses.

Wheels Up recently acquired Avianis, a manufacturer of advanced flight management systems, to streamline aircraft operations and tracking. Wheels Up will use that technology to further reduce friction in the quoting and reserving of private aircraft flights for its own operations and plans to sell the service to other charter and management companies. The acquisition follows Wheels Up’s other recent acquisition of Travel Management Co., which owns and manages a fleet of 26 Hawker 400XP aircraft in North America.

Wheels Up has some 6,700 members in its program, which promises members access to its owned airplanes with 24 hours’ notice. It has also introduced numerous other membership levels. For example, those with lower needs for business travel can buy a membership for an initiation fee as low as $2,995 the first year; $2,495 in subsequent years. For that, customers can access the Wheels Up fleet with certain limitations.