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Eastern Europe Tries to Think Business Aviation Outside its Box

Eastern Europe Tries to Think Business Aviation Outside its Box If you are interested in a broad, nuanced view of aviation in all of Europe, you will have appreciated the annual Central Europe Private Aviation (CEPA) conference in Prague in late November. It had over 200 aviation specialists and industry stakeholders in wide-ranging operational, commercial and regulatory discussions. It was a showcase for the dynamic aspirations of the ‘economies in transition’ both in, and beyond, the east of the EU. One interesting feature of CEPA is that its agenda extends to include commercial airlines. This is an important gesture towards finding common ground between the two sectors. Too often, business aviation suffers from isolated analysis. At best, this relegates it to an out-of-category ´general aviation´ sectors, as the EU refer to it. Worse, it probably encourages the perception of its niche, luxury character, and thus distinctive from the mainstream transportation business. Of course, business aviation is different from the scheduled airline sector – not least it´s an unscheduled and premium product. But it is surely still about business. Its operators need to be financially viable, its passengers fly, for the most part, for business purposes, and from the most recent study of the economic value of business aviation, the contribution of the business aviation sector to European GDP, in terms of direct and indirect revenues, is an annual €20 billion. At least €1 billion of that is generated from Central and Eastern Europe. Whilst business aviation activity collapsed in Western Europe during the 2008-2012 recession it surged in Central, East and South-East Europe, with Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the Czech Republic seeing double digit growth. Since 2000, the CEPA territory fleet has grown by a factor of ten. Just in terms of charter activity, that represents a €500 million market. Annual MRO revenues are also in the region of €300 million. So Central and Eastern Europe is no small fry when it comes to European business aviation. Too often overlooked for the larger leading EU markets, the region´s importance is getting justified, if belated, promotion through CEPA. But now it finds itself in a bit of a rut. While there has been impressive growth in the last decade, 2013 paints a less encouraging picture. This year activity has fallen 6%, and previous growth stars such as Russia and Poland are seeing big declines in flights. No doubt the slump owes something to the relative spike in 2012 activity when Poland and Ukraine hosted the Euro Football championships. But the underlying economic support to business aviation has darkened in the meantime, at least for Eastern Europe and Russia. And economically, the region remains highly dependent on the Euro zone´s fragile recuperation. The industry also has basic problems, with under-developed infrastructure and shortage in resources dedicated to business aviation, as well as reputedly widespread illegal charter activity. If there is some truth to the opinion that business aviation is not always 100% business-oriented, it is in its seeming inability to respond to a slump. This is as true in Eastern Europe as it is in the rest of the market. Faced with an obvious decline in customer demand, its stakeholders, in much of the discussion at CEPA, did not seem to be directly concerned with solutions. One rather obvious in particular: how should they go about attracting more passengers onto their aircraft? Rather, the main topics of debate tend to orientate around technical issues concerning aircraft import and registration. A particular concern is how to reduce taxes and simplify transactions. In other words, there was a strong interest in facilitating aircraft purchases. This tells you that the customer of interest is not the charter passenger but the aircraft purchaser. In turn, this radically reduces the addressable market to the fabled few HNWI (high net worth individuals) sufficiently wealthy to own an aircraft. It ignores the thousands of individuals, entrepreneurs and businesses who make up the charter passengers which float the fleet. Perhaps the reason the industry is not able to reach out to this audience is that it lacks the scale to market an effective consumer brand. Or it may be that its executives´ operational mentality obscures the commercial reality. But that reality is now urgent. Unless business aviation operators can work out how to appeal to users, not just owners, its growth potential is limited. It is not enough to base future prospects entirely on the impressive growth curve in the tiny number of super-wealthy would-be owners. This brings us back to the airlines. To its credit, CEPA´s agenda encouraged its delegates to debate potential for integrating commercial and business aviation services. A number of such alliances were cited: Delta, Korean, Singapore and Lufthansa all offer their premium customers jet charters, operated by their business aviation partners. These are relatively tiny ventures and the consensus is that such opportunities are very limited. But it is not just operational collaboration for which biz-av should look to airlines for inspiration. More broadly, it should look to see how the best airlines have survived and even prospered through the recession. There are lessons to learn. Those that have prospered most are of course the LCCs. We are all familiar with their competitive advantages: homogenous fleet, scaled-up financing, aggressive marketing, no frills on-board service, high rates of utilization, online distribution… Although business aviation offers a very different experience to easyJet, many of the same efficiencies are potentially available. But whether through lack of imagination or simply because the operators´ traditional business model is inflexible, the lessons are ignored. Business aviation should not only seek to imitate successful innovation in commercial aviation, it should also exploit the gaps opened up by its scheduled counterpart. Over the last eight years in Europe, this network has provided zero net growth in flights. In fact the huge growth in LCC activity has masked equally substantial declines in the regional networks. As this short-haul coverage recedes, biz-av should have an opportunity to appeal to customers who are increasingly left stranded without a direct connection. Richard Koe, Aviation Advocacy

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