As the business aviation leaders of Europe gather to talk and do business at EBACE, we’ve been thinking more than ever about cooperation and collaboration. 

Again and again, we see the same theme: collaboration multiplies possibilities (and profits) in a way that competition simply doesn’t. In both the business and tech worlds, the “open source” ethic is winning the day. Freely exchanging information and pursuing partnerships allows businesses to scale quickly and focus intensively on that which makes them most innovative. 

To seize these opportunities, here are some effective approaches for enhancing your company’s ability to communicate, collaborate and drive more business. 

Adopt friendlier data systems

If you have the budget to replace your unwieldy legacy IT systems, it’s probably a good idea. But if you need to work with what you have, then using application programming interfaces (APIs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms can be a smart work-around. Not only do they provide the functionality that you need, SaaS platforms make it possible to work collaborate with other businesses using the same. Google’s G suite is a good example of this. Information can flow at a whole new speed when it’s moving across the same system. 

Explore new ways to communicate 

Voice calls are increasingly becoming a relic of the past. Interestingly enough, so are emails. The Chinese market has been pioneering in this respect, with brokers inviting operators to put forward bids through the ‘WeChat’ mobile messaging app. At Avinode, our new messaging feature, specifically designed for business aviation, takes this idea to the next level. We calculate that operators and brokers normally need 42 interactions to organize a charter flight. Wouldn’t it be great to have all those messages in one chain, in one place? Now you can. 

Embrace the cross-sell 

For years now, the global travel industry has expertly developed and exploited online cross-marketing. If you go to book a flight through an airline website right now, you’ll almost certainly be asked if you want to book a hotel at your destination too. No doubt it will be a highly targeted and personalized list of hotel room options, based on your past interactions. 

While the private aviation industry can’t act on the same scale as the world’s leading airlines, we can learn from their best ideas. Could you be serving your customers better by promoting complementary partners? Could you capture more value by making your website a luxury lifestyle one-stop shop? It will certainly take some intensive collaboration with new partners to make this happen, but if all goes to plan, then you’ll both begin to see the win-win dividends of joining forces.