New Frontier of Travel
A blog around new airlines starting and the funding that they received from VCs.
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New Frontier of Travel – Fly the New Frontier of Travel
New Frontier of Travel – Fly the New Frontier of Travel. A blog around new airlines starting and the funding that they received from VCs.
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Fly in style with these new, luxurious airlines. We cover news and updates on all new airline startups and their funding rounds, so you can be the first to know about up-and-coming airlines!
Startups featured here:
Surf Air [Read more] [Edit]
Volaris [Read more] [Edit]
Alitalia [Read more] [Edit]
JetSmart [Read more] [Edit]
Azul Airlines [Read more] [Edit]
NokScoot [Read more] [Edit]
Transavia Airlines [Read more] [Edit]
Air Asia India [Read more] [Edit]
Avianca Holdings S.A. (NYSE: AVH) (BVC: PFAVH) is a Colombian airline group with its headquarters in Bogotá, Colombia,
The New Frontier of Travel
These days, there’s no shortage of airline startups. There’s also no shortage of people who want to know why anyone would want to start a new airline, given the industry’s history. Let’s take a look at some of the new airlines and their investors.*
The planes are the same, but they fly higher, faster, and more efficiently. The new frontier of travel is in the air.
It’s a little bit like Uber for flights: you can book a seat at a super-low cost (sometimes as cheap as $50), only if you’re able to book ahead of time, are flexible about your destination, and are willing to share the plane with others. General travelers who want to get from Point A to Point B as quickly and conveniently as possible aren’t the target audience.
Two companies that have raised VC funding are offering this type of travel experience: Surf Air and Beacon. Other companies, such as JetSmarter, offer similar services with monthly memberships rather than individual flight tickets.
Air travel has always been fascinating to me. Planes are a way of moving people, goods and services around the globe. I love flying and I want to share what I know with you.
I am a frequent traveler, always looking for new airlines that start up and offering new ways to fly.
Air travel is an essential part of modern life, but it can be difficult to understand. For many years, only a few airlines dominated the industry, so it wasn’t always possible to find cheap flights or even flights at all to some destinations. Today we have many options for air travel and there is intense competition among airlines for our business. This means that there are more choices than ever before for travelers and prices are kept low as a result of this competitive environment.
Sometime in the last few years, airline travel has gone from painful to pernicious. It’s not just the fees for checked bags and carry-ons, or the inability to sit next to your traveling companion unless you pay extra. It’s that it’s no longer possible to fly anywhere within the United States without feeling like you’ve been fleeced.
This week, I had a quick trip from New York City to Columbus, Ohio. I booked my ticket on Frontier Airlines, one of a small but growing number of low-cost carriers that are starting service on routes previously dominated by the big airlines. A round-trip ticket on Frontier between Columbus and New York cost me $358—not much more than I paid for a one-way ticket on American Airlines a few years ago. The flight was direct; it left at 6:30 p.m., meaning I didn’t have to burn half a day traveling; and the plane was nice and new—a 2016 Airbus A320.
That last point is important, because even though Frontier bills itself as a low-cost carrier, it is a far cry from Spirit Airlines, which offers rock-bottom fares but nickel-and-dimes you for everything else (its planes are also old). Nor
Last week, we looked at the planes that will fill up the skies in twenty years. But who will be flying them? Right now, there are fewer than a dozen airlines in the world with more than one hundred planes, and each of them has spent decades building up its fleet and routes. In the future, many new airlines will begin service—and they may not look anything like today’s airlines.
The airline industry is changing quickly because it is being invaded by a new kind of player: an airline without any planes, routes, or employees. These airlines don’t exist yet, but they have already raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors.
When people talk about new airlines starting up, they usually mean that someone bought some old planes and started flying them on existing routes. But these new entrants are something completely different: They operate no flights themselves, but instead sell seats on other airlines’ flights.* This model is called “virtual interlining,” and it’s about to disrupt the entire airline industry—if it doesn’t get shut down first.
The airline industry was one of the most heavily regulated in the world. It was run by a cartel of older airlines, who would decide collectively how much to charge passengers. A new airline could not enter without getting approval from the cartel, and the cartel generally said no.
But in 1978, Frank Lorenzo gained control of Texas International Airlines, and decided to test the limits of deregulation. He bought a larger airline, Continental, and moved its headquarters to Houston so he could fly from there to California.
The older airlines sued to stop him. But they had been so used to operating under the protective umbrella of regulation that they didn’t realize how dangerous it was for them to challenge Lorenzo in court. Their legal team called witnesses who testified that an unregulated Continental would only have one recourse if it couldn’t make money flying people between Houston and California: lying on the ground in Houston emitting black smoke.
Lorenzo won his case, flew his planes, made money, then used it to acquire Eastern Airlines, which he used as a springboard to acquire Continental again. By 1990 he controlled several major US airlines and had driven three of them into bankruptcy.