Flightaides - Flying Anxiety, Eased!

What is Flightaides?

Flightaides is an industry-first online marketplace that lets air travelers who need assistance, get help from their fellow passengers, instead of relying on airlines, airports, or hired companions.

This problem has existed since the beginning of time. So, why now? After witnessing and experiencing air travel issues for decades, we took it upon ourselves to finally carve out a sharing economy model, on the heels of stalwarts like AirBnb, Lyft, Uber, DoorDash and Instacart. Curious as to why we built an online marketplace, that too in the middle of a global pandemic? 

Read on!

The Problem(s) Flightaides Is Trying To Solve

Ease flying anxiety

With all the bells and whistles associated with air travel, flying is an experience in itself. And for many, it is the most stressful part of traveling. 

Why so? Well, there are people who are anxious first-time flyers, and could do with a companion to talk them through it. And then there are travelers with infants and toddlers, who can’t be left on their own even for a minute. Also, there could be a person with visual or physical impediments, whose confidence tanks to unprecedented lows in crowded airports. Weighed down by stress, these people can potentially forget to take that one critical dose of their medication.

Is that it? No. 

There’s a large category of travelers, who have language barriers, and even expressing simple phrases like “water with no ice” is such an ordeal that sometimes they would much rather drink that ice-chilled water than make another attempt to clarify. And then there are the pronunciation quirks between American English ("schedule", pronounced as "ske-dule") and British English ("schedule", pronounced as "shee-dule") that can derail critical conversations in airports, and further sour the flying experience.

If you feel you’ve got the hang of why we did what we did, there’s more! March in a single file through security while shedding precious belongings (shoes off, jackets off, laptops out, phones out, food, liquids, ...) and then remember to collect everything back again. Or else... (By the way, this is where the passport or government ID might do that amazing nerve-racking disappearing trick.) To top it off, immigration, customs and baggage claim have challenges of their own, with an outside possibility of delays and lost or misplaced baggage. 

And while the air traveler juggles with all this, friends and family worry about their safety since not all travelers are mobile-savvy enough to connect to any available WIFI when data packs are out of reach, check messages, and provide regular updates. And we haven’t even begun on jetlag that can further aggravate the situation. 

But it’s not all bad. Let’s find some goodness now. Let’s flip the coin and assess the other side. 

Capture the flightaide’s missed opportunity

While some air travelers are struggling and stressing out, others could be able and willing to help. They may be frequent air travelers - for example, they could be traveling back and forth for business, or could be students visiting their home countries now and then, or could simply be good samaritans eager to lend a helping hand to those in need. Travel can be expensive, and while offering their companion services, they could make money to pay for part of their travel bills. Or, they could be doing it just to feel good about it and might donate the proceeds to their favorite charity.

Whatever be their cause, we strongly believe that Flightaides could help create and nurture a global community of compassionate air travelers who treat their fellow passengers with empathy. They could be the guardian angel who looks up foreign exchange rates to help get local currency. They might even be able to help vacationers book hotels and tours, in case they’ve visited the place before. This helps establish the human-to-human connection, even if the flightaide and the air traveler don’t meet again. And in some cases, we sincerely hope for and believe that the air traveler seeking assistance and the flightaide would become friends.

Can’t The Airlines Or Airports Help?

Of course, they can! And they should. However, this isn’t their primary line of business and they have other high-priority tasks to take care of. They might have the best of intent but there’s little focus and ownership. 

Do they realize that? We think so, and that’s why Namaskar has been initiated by a reputed airline and MUrgency has been offered by a reputed airport. Having said that, these services are largely disjoint and impersonal, and don’t offer an end-to-end flying experience that a flightaide can potentially offer their fellow air travelers, who’ve chatted with them about their specific needs, and then hired and paid them for their services. With flightaides, there’s accountability.

So, while others are at it, we want to help out anxious air travelers and flightaides leverage our online marketplace that we purpose-built just for them. 

Come now - let’s take a deeper look at our platform.

The flightaides.com Online Marketplace

Flightaides offers an online platform where:

• air travelers seeking assistance, and fellow air travelers offering to help (dubbed, flightaides) can sign up and create their profiles
• flightaides can add upcoming flights on which they are willing to help their fellow air travelers
• air travelers who need help can search for flightaides based on their flight information and date of journey
• if flightaides aren't immediately available, travelers can request to be notified whenever flightaides do become available
• travelers can send requests to flightaides to seek their help during that flight
• flightaides and travelers can send each other secure messages via the platform and chat to understand the needs better
• once the flightaide accepts the traveler's request for help, the traveler can make a reservation with a secure credit card payment
• once the flight is complete, the traveler and flightaide review each other

The illustration maps the traveler’s journey, along with the flightaide’s, through our platform.

What’s Next For flightaides.com

Flightaides.com has successfully completed a soft launch in early July of 2020, amidst a global pandemic. While we want to have as many customer validations under our belt, and proceed towards the hard launch, we want our potential customers to fly only when it’s safe. So, while we wait, we are gathering feedback from startup accelerators and friends/family.

Here’s a sneak peek into our product backlog, that we will prioritize in due time. 

First, we should enable the air traveler who needs assistance to directly tip their flightaide, on top of the service fee that they pay today. They don’t have to tip, but if they choose to, 100% of those tips go to the flightaide. 

Second, we should partner with charitable organizations, so that flightaides who wish to donate their proceeds, can do so easily via our platform. These donations would be 100% tax deductible.

Third, we aim to partner with travel portals, like expedia.com, booking.com, makemytrip.com and others, who will be able to search and hire flightaides for their customers, or even register their customers as flightaides on our platform. We also plan to cater to ticketing agencies, who lack online portals but do business on phone, by providing them means to send us user data in excel sheets, which we will upload to our database. 

Fourth, we aim to partner with travel insurance companies, since we would like to offer our users an enhanced experience with recommendations to buy travel insurance from our partners.

So on, and so forth. We are eager to hear from you as to what could be next, so that you can influence us, and shape the direction of the platform.

Beachhead Market To Launch Flightaides

A beachhead market can be defined as a small market with specific characteristics that make it an ideal target to sell a new product or service. 

With that in mind, we’ve decided to launch Flightaides to the Indian diaspora in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. To prove liquidity, or in other words, supply and demand, we might further slice and dice into a thin sliver of the beachhead market, for example, Mumbai - New York, or Hyderabad - Toronto, or Delhi - London, or some other crucial leg.

The Flightaides Business Model

It all starts when an air traveler seeking assistance starts to chat with a flightaide on our platform. Once they’ve flushed out the requirements, the flightaide formally accepts their fellow air traveler's request for help by signing the co-traveler agreement. The traveler signs the same co-traveler agreement and hires the flightaide by making a secure credit card payment. 70% of that payment goes to the flightaide, while the business keeps a 30% commission. 

It’s possible that users get acquired via 3rd party travel or ticketing agencies, like expedia.com, booking.com, makemytrip.com or other similar portals, and not directly via the flightaides.com. For those scenarios, the 3rd party agencies will get compensated by a revenue sharing model, whereby the business will make a reduced commission. We intend to keep the flightaide’s share of the payment to a solid 70% regardless of the user acquisition strategy. It is the least we can do to express gratitude to this community.

Additionally, we will partner with relevant companies in the travel sector, travel insurance for example, and let our users buy travel insurance from our partners. In this case, our partners will compensate us with a revenue sharing model and this will be our source of passive revenue.

Ads can be a source of passive revenue too, but the onus lies on us to figure out a mutually-beneficial way that doesn’t tarnish the user’s experience.

Could Flightaides Pose Danger?

The air traveler who needs assistance is vulnerable, and that’s why they need a flightaide to help them through their journey. What if the flightaide is a predator, who wants to take advantage? This is a very legitimate question and let’s find some answers together. 

First, every traveler’s passport or Government ID gets verified by authorized personnel, and red flags can disallow any traveler from flying. Hence, instead of re-inventing the wheel, Flightaides relies on each country’s government to establish standards for document verification.

Second, the traveler and the flightaide do business at airports and inside aircrafts, which are typically crowded with other passengers who can promptly answer an urgent call for help. Additionally, airports and airlines have authorized personnel on duty, making it hard for predators to operate freely. With all due respect to ride sharing apps, a rider is often more prone to a potentially harmful driver inside the confined spaces of the driver’s car. Also, in the home sharing model, a guest is just as much prone to unknown dangers when living inside a host’s place. We understand the riders and guests may not be as vulnerable as air travelers seeking assistance, but at the same time, we would like to encourage everyone to not get caught up in the paranoia. 

Third, any vulnerable air traveler, with or without an accompanying flightaide, can be susceptible to predators, and flightaides.com doesn’t necessarily inflate that risk further. In certain cases, the risk could be higher if this vulnerable air traveler were traveling alone. 

Fourth, travelers and flightaides leave each other reviews and are able to share their experiences, good or bad. Other users can then make more informed choices, and the business can choose to take action by restricting certain users from operating on our platform.

What if travelers don’t feel comfortable sharing their contact information with flightaides?

Flightaides.com has its own chat platform that supports messages going back and forth between the traveler and the flightaide. We strongly encourage users to stick to our chat platform, since we hide a portion of their names to limit their exposure. However, despite our guidance, travelers and flightaides can choose to share personal information via our chat platform, in which case, it becomes hard to protect their privileges.

The bottom line is that we will try our utmost to protect our users, and we will continue to educate our users on how to protect themselves. Together, we can create a safe environment to create and nurture this upcoming community of flightaides.

Dare To Pair!

To pair with a flightaide or to become a flightaide, sign up. 

If you have questions, comments or feedback, contact us. 

If you want to invest in us, send us a note and we will get back to you with our pitch deck. 

One way or another, help spread the word about a global flightaide community that’s going to take the fear out of flying! Especially now, and also in the long run. 

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