VistaJet, part of the UAE-based Vista Global Holding, has revealed plans to increase the size of its fleet by almost 25 percent by the end of next year.
The private aviation outfit currently boasts a fleet of 76 aircraft, with a further jet set to be added “in the next couple of days”, according to company’s chief commercial officer, Ian Moore (above), who was talking to Arabian Business from Dubai Airshow.
This will be followed over the next 12 months by a further ten more Challenger 350 aircraft and nine more Global 7500s.
Moore explained: “The orders for the 7500s were made back in 2013, but the 350s we purchased at the start of Q4 last year, when a lot of people were still looking over their shoulder and wondering if they’ll make ends meet.
“We’re taking advantage of that now as we’re taking delivery of aircraft and I think that’s probably the biggest restriction on private aviation at the moment is there’s just not enough new aircraft in the marketplace because people really pulled back for six-to-nine months during the pandemic.”
VistaJet currently has four Global 7500s in its arsenal, which have a run-rate of flying 1,400 hours each annually – Moore explained that general aircraft typically fly 300 hours-per-year. “That is a large amount of hours for a private aviation aircraft,” he said.
“This leads us to believe we’ve taken the right choice by taking delivery of that aircraft and we’re excited about building the fleet further.”
Moore revealed that globally the company has been back to full business “for almost six-to-nine months now”, and is up 67 percent on pre-Covid levels in terms of Program flight hours sold during the first half of 2021 .
“We’ve bounced back from Covid and well and truly accelerated from that point onwards, which I think shows you the power of the VistaJet program and its shared-ownership model, and on top of that just generally the demand for private aviation,” he said.
In the first six months of this year, he said that Dubai has been the most popular destination across the entire group globally; while regionally VistaJet is up 100 percent year-on-year for new Program members – people who sign-up to three-year committed hours on a per hour basis. And the number of flights for the first half of the year was up 134 percent versus last year for the Middle East.
“If you remember Q1, most of the Middle East was still in some form of lockdown, especially Saudi, so we’re really happy with those sort of numbers,” he said.
Moore added that the third quarter of this year was an “amazing quarter” for the company, with 9,000 flights operated worldwide over the three-month period – the number of flights overall are up 35 percent compared to 2020.
He said: “Being a global operator, we rely on the entire world to open up, and I think if you look particularly at Asia where there’s been restrictions on flying and capabilities, so to be up 20 percent from pre-Covid and then we’ve still a big part of the world being restricted in one way or the other, we’re really happy with those numbers.
“Before Covid about 10 percent of people who could afford to fly privately were flying privately. So that basically told you that 90 percent of the people who could afford to fly privately weren’t previously.
“You can see the extremely long runway you had of people that maybe were flying commercially before but now were moving towards flying privately because that’s what they’re investing their money in.”
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