The Travel Service Every Luxury Flyer Needs To Know
Business and first-class plane tickets are expensive for a reason. The difference between flying economy and business/first-class is night and day, and basic market forces dictate that these upgraded experiences should be significantly more costly.
If you’re a frequent luxury-class flyer however, you may have gotten the feeling that sometimes the price of the tickets may just be slightly detached from their true market value. That feeling, it turns out, is accurate. “Airlines use very complex pricing schemes for luxury-class tickets that often have zero relationship with supply and demand of the actual luxury-class tickets”, says Yosef Rosenzweig, CEO of Executive Flights. ”For example, if the economy cabin on a flight is under-booked, raising the price of business class seats can cover the losses of multiple economy seats”. There are many other reasons why prices fluctuate seemingly at random, and according to Yosef, understanding these nuances is the key to making luxury travel much less expensive.
Yosef would seem to be an odd candidate to choose a career as a luxury travel expert, with his solidly middle-class Toronto upbringing and thrifty instincts deeply implanted by his parents. But a late-teens fascination with traveling got him started on a path he could never have predicted. “Traveling the world became my number one interest and hobby, and because I had limited resources, the only way I was able to do it was to get really creative and really good at exploiting any opening or opportunity.” Slowly but surely, his understanding of the industry grew, and he began to notice that everywhere he looked, there were inefficiencies that a savvy consumer could exploit, and that conversely, un-savvy consumers were getting exploited by.
This new knowledge, combined with his luxury-travel geekery pointed in an obvious direction. “The inefficiencies and irrationality in the luxury market seemed to me like an opportunity”. He started small, helping out Toronto-area businessmen he knew while in college. “I didn’t really have any intentions of pursuing this as a full-time thing”, he says.
Executive Flights has now become an industry leader in discounted luxury travel, regularly booking first-option tickets for clients at 20-40% less than quoted prices. A specialty of the company are flights to/from Asia and Australia, a routes famous for thereoutrageous pricing. How do they do it? “It’s mostly pretty simple stuff. We have a deep understanding of airline pricing and reward miles, and we maintain relationships with key people at airlines and travel agencies”.
Yosef Rosenzweig CEO and founder of Executive Flights
Executive Flights is also expanding into the private jet space, having just entered into a partnership with M2 Jets. “This is another area that we thought was ripe for disruption”, says Yosef. “Private jet travel is getting increasingly competitive, and it’s come to a point where it makes sense economically to a whole new level of businessmen and executives”.
“Luxury-class travel has always been expensive, and it always will. But expensive doesn’t have to mean unreasonable, and getting a good bang for your buck is an outcome consumers at every level deserve and should expect”.