February 12, 2025
Vista’s XO is one of private aviation’s most recognized brands. From operator to charter platform to marketplace, is instant booking working?
XO is one of private aviation’s best-known brands.
It has a history of innovation, first as an operator and later as a private jet charter broker and platform.
Its predecessor, XOJet, founded in 2006, was at the forefront of the floating fleet model for private jet charter with point-to-point pricing.
It was among the first charter operators to attract large private equity firms, gaining investment from Continental Airlines’ backer, TPG, in 2007 and 2009.
It was among the first charter operators to grow with a fleet of owned and leased private jets for the charter market.
The traditional private jet charter market utilized mainly managed aircraft that required owner approval and had to return to base after every trip.
READ: Where does your private jet come from?
It also launched flat-rate transcontinental pricing.
XOJet was the first large charter operator to have WiFi fleetwide in 2011.
It then built a $100 million off-fleet private jet charter brokerage business, a hybrid model.
XOJet was also one of the first to charge membership fees, comparing the access it provides to golf clubs.
After Vista Global bought XOJet in 2018, its new owner spun out its brokerage, merging it with the 2019 acquisition of JetSmarter, a leader in digital booking.
Since then, XO has been one of Vista Global’s two consumer brands alongside VistaJet.
Starting in 2022, XO phased out its Elite Access fixed-rate jet card that offered guaranteed hourly pricing on light, midsize, and super-midsize jets.
After the 2023 Jet Edge acquisition, Vista Global narrowed its prepaid offerings and ended Jet Edge’s programs. (The XOJet fleet and other acquisitions were rolled into Vista America.)
VistaJet would focus on stand-up cabin super-mids and larger jets with fixed rates. To complement its Program jet card, which starts at 50 hours per year, VistaJet launched a new one, beginning at 25 hours, under the VJ25 moniker.
READ: Here’s what you need to know about VistaJet before you buy
XO would focus on digital bookings using dynamic pricing memberships and ad hoc customers, crowdsourcing, and by-the-seat solutions. (With flyers who use this website seeking fixed/capped rates over dynamic pricing by a nearly 10-to-1 margin, the number of Private Jet Card Comparisons subscribers in XO’s programmatic offerings has dropped in half since 2022.)
Most importantly, XO would offer the ability to book charter flights for members and ad hoc customers on the spot, with guaranteed pricing on third-party operators.
This would eliminate the back-and-forth that usually occurs. Call it the Uber or Expedia of private jets, whichever you prefer.
However, the Expedia of private jets has mainly been a fallacy.
It has been mostly limited to operators selling their fleets for instant booking at guaranteed prices.
A few brokers have tried it, including Simple Charters, a 2022 Vista Global acquisition.
Can XO bridge the gap of instant booking to third-party operators?
Can it create an actual real-time booking marketplace for private jet charter flights?
How is its journey to instant booking going?
How many third-party operators and tails currently offer instant booking guaranteed on-demand charter pricing?
What are the hurdles to grow those operators?
Will XO again answer the call of flyers who want fixed rates?
Is crowdsourcing dead?
We recently spoke with Vista Global’s Chief Business Officer, Youssef Mouallem, for an update on the Xs and Os of XO.
Where we are with VistaJet and XO is that we are much clearer in terms of our product stacking. With VistaJet, we have fixed rates and guaranteed availability. There is a unified fleet (focused on the super-midsize, large cabin, and ultra-long-haul aircraft) with global coverage for the fixed hourly rates – no repositioning. You only pay for the time you are on the airplane. This is for our frequent flyers. Then we have the customers who fly but not necessarily as frequently, who don’t see the need or want to have a minimum commitment of 25 or 50 hours. This is where our XO membership products come in. XO Reserve (a $250,000 deposit) and XO Membership ($100,000) serve two different tiers based on your need to travel, how frequently you travel, et cetera. They offer you an on-demand product. You don’t have guaranteed rates. You don’t necessarily have guaranteed availability at the same level as VistaJet. You still have better access to the fleet than anybody else. Then, you get the perks of loyalty credits. Beyond that, XO is predominantly an ad hoc product.
XO is predominantly a brokerage business because you’re not guaranteed access to the fleet. We’re looking at differentiating our offering by first having the biggest marketplace accessible to flyers and, two, by making sure that that marketplace is vetted in terms of safety, insurance, operations, crew, et cetera. Third, we’re using the tech that we’ve developed in-house, and we’ve been honing it for the past few years to offer instantly bookable trips that are, on the one hand, credible. What you see on the marketplace in terms of the picture and the features of the aircraft are what you’re going to meet when you’re on the tarmac. It’s the exact same aircraft, so credibility and building trust are key. Two, building credibility and trust as well in the pricing so that you get to see a price that when you click on it, we’re going to be able to honor it, or the operators that will go on the marketplace will be able to honor it. This is where we will work with our partner operators and what the tech has gone in.
We closed last year with 55% membership and 45% ad hoc. I expect we’ll be at 50-50 this year. Our ad hoc is growing faster, and we’re accelerating that as well. We are getting around 10,000 searches per week.
After all the changes, we are at about 1,800 active members, and yes, it is down from those days. After resetting the products, some of our members and the Elite tier either progressed to Reserve, some went to VistaJet’s products, or some stepped out of membership.
This year, we are focusing on that base ad hoc charter, a massive market. Vista has not historically played quite significantly in that space. With the changes that we’re seeing around us in terms of economic changes, cost of flying, that base is increasing either incoming wealth or people that were not very frequent flyers, and they’re downgrading in terms of number of the frequency of flying and type of aircraft that they fly. We set out to build the largest global marketplace you could access through the XO brand and the XO app and tech.
We started by building stronger alliances and partnerships with operators. We go out to these partners. We talk with them about our market understanding. We get to understand the market that they serve. We look at pricing and how they do their pricing. We share with them our pricing algorithms with the ultimate objective of pricing on their behalf. If you understand the pricing parameters, our algorithms will price the trip. Ultimately, we want to get to get (charter) operators that are integrated.
We have 246 operators in our marketplace (excluding the Vista Members Fleet), which offers us access to 2,100 tails. These are safety vet and; insurance vetted. With some of these operators, we integrate their flight scheduling systems. We read the availability immediately. If the request comes in to fly from A to B, we can immediately read through our tech where the aircraft are. Which is the best-positioned aircraft? Who’s the operator? Then, we serve that up in terms of the search. We’ve got 76 integrated operators today, giving us access to 700 integrated aircraft, so one-third of our partner fleet is already integrated. In terms of pricing, we have 24 operators with 210 aircraft. Add to that over 250 for the Vista Members Fleet.
Part of the work that we do with integration, there is a piece which is the technology piece, connecting into the schedule where the heavy lifting is our team connecting with their team and agreeing on the principles and the ground rules of their scheduling. What do they capture? What do they not capture? How often do they update that? Then, that’s on the operator end upstream. Downstream, we do a recurring check whenever we read the scheduling.
If a trip does not get served for any issue, our tech captures that, and our operator success team reaches out to the operator to say there was an issue with this trip. We keep going back to them. We get notified and say, ‘Hold on, your schedule said this. We asked for the trip. That’s what came up.’ We work with them. All that stresses the importance of building these deeper, closer connections with the operators. So, yes, it is a marketplace served with technology, but how we have connected with the operators, how frequently we talk to them, and how close our team is to their team is pivotal to this success.
Today, we’re at about 95% accuracy, where what we see is what we get. Over the last 18 months, we’ve done a lot of work in cleanup with the way we read the schedules and then integrate with them.
Yes. With the operators we are integrated for pricing, we currently have about 98% accuracy on pricing. You’ve got that 2% that comes back, which they might come back and say, ‘Hey, the price has changed.’ But for the customer, we are honoring the price we sold. We are only selling instant pricing where it is agreed with the operators. As a consumer, you book it, and it’s done.
Part of the evolution is that we acknowledge a market for very light, light, and midsize jets we need to address. Today, we don’t have the fleets to address that (after selling off its U.S. light jet fleet). It’s not Vista’s strategy. This is our answer to that with a transparent, trusted, instantly bookable product. Is there an opportunity to offer or explore a guaranteed rate there? I don’t know, maybe down the road, but that’s not what we’re looking at now.
We are answering the question of trust there because as you go down the aircraft product pyramid, you have a lot of variations. You sometimes have issues with the age of the aircraft, the safety levels, what you’re going to get when you get on board, and all that stuff you hear about every day. We are saying what you will get on the tarmac and what you see on your booking. We’ve seen quite an increase in conversion. When it comes to instantly bookable routes that we’re offering, the conversion rate is three times higher (than the request). There’s an uptake, and that leads us to believe that consumers want to be able to book now and trust what they book.
Predominantly, this is on the U.S. East Coast – north/south flights for lights and mids, and the Southcentral for lights and mids, and Transcon. We’re expanding in the Pacific Southwest. We’re addressing (regions) one at a time because of the learnings. Once we can integrate the operator and go set geography, we need to offer depth and breadth. We need to be able to have three or four trusted operators. Today, there are 40,000 routes (unique airport pairs) for which we offer instant booking. We had less than a handful of operators integrated for instant booking a year ago.
We want to more than double that number of integrated operators, and Europe makes sense as a place to start expanding internationally.
The easiest piece is tech integration. The more complicated part is making sense of the data, making sure that the schedules are accurate, the way we are reading the schedules and we’re interpreting them is meaningful, and not picking up any inaccurate data that ends up transpiring through the product to the trip offerings and the booking offerings that we have. That’s what takes more time. It’s about integrating to a level of saying, ‘We trust the information – hands off the wheel. We can reiterate.’
It is a fair challenge. We’ve had that discussion with that challenge internally. Yes, you might be able to get a few hundred dollars off from another broker, but if you enter that repeatability and that trust, we’re seeing that people are coming back, and if it is a couple of a hundred dollars difference, they still want to be able to book it right there and then. They get on the app on the website. They see the price. They book it. They put the details; it’s done. They don’t need to go back and forth and send an email and wait for somebody to call back, and it’s available and done. And very importantly, even if the flight is booked off-fleet, the customer is looked after by our client services teams.
Not at all. Our customer service and our account management team support what XO offers, so you’re looked after. You’ve got the option for doing all of the digital booking, but at the same time, in parallel, we’ve got our customer service client services team that is on call 24/7 around the globe to service all of these trips. It’s not because it is instantly bookable; there is no intervention or human support system. If the client wishes to speak to somebody, it’s easily accessible.
We are re-engineering our user interface, which is coming live, and we are trying to capture as many of these indicators as possible. What’s the purpose of the trip? We look at the customer’s history. If someone has flown with us also, we serve that up immediately in the search so that our client service team knows if it’s a trip that’s been booked. This person has gone skiing three times and booked this trip. Maybe the aircraft they chose is not the right one. We flag if there’s anything that needs to be checked.
There is a bit of refocus and re-energizing to be put behind the crowdsourcing. Between building the instantly bookable routes and scaling the buy-the-seat (recently outsourced shuttles), crowdsourcing has gotten less love. It’s a product that we’re looking at now; what tech enhancements do we want to do also, the back end of it is a bit complicated.
READ: XO to outsource by-the-seat shuttles
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