While hotels have Booking.com, transport has Uber and Lyft, and airlines have Expedia and Google Flights, private aviation is the only premium category that runs on relationships, spreadsheets and email threads.
Private aviation marketplace Jettly is urging US charter operators to publish live availability and upfront pricing, responding to a new industry forecast projecting $247 billion in business jet transactions through 2030.
The call from CEO and founder Justin Crabbe follows Global Jet Capital's latest Five-Year New and Pre-Owned Transaction Forecast, which places North America at 73.9 per cent of global activity. Crabbe argues the US charter market cannot absorb that growth on email chains and phone-based quoting.
While hotels have Booking.com, ground transport has Uber and Lyft, and airlines have Expedia and Google Flights, private aviation is the only premium travel category that still runs largely on relationships, spreadsheets and email threads. That structural gap is the biggest constraint on a sector Fortune Business Insights values at $72.38 billion in 2025, with North America accounting for $38.01 billion of the total.
Demand is not the issue, it says. The same research cites a Honeywell survey showing 80 per cent of new business jet users intend to keep flying private even after commercial networks have fully recovered from the COVID pandemic.
Early platforms show what happens when the model works. Vista's XO marketplace grew 66 per cent in 2025 and cut booking times from days to seconds, with conversion rates around three times higher than through conventional channels. FlyJets launched its JetGPT conversational booking tool in February, and Elevate Jet released an app in March offering upfront pricing across six aircraft categories.
Jettly is calling for a voluntary transparency standard among US Part 135 operators covering three items: live aircraft availability, all-in pricing before booking, and published safety and insurance credentials. The company plans to release its operator-vetting methodology on its own platform later this quarter and invite peer platforms to align.
Justin Crabbe, CEO and founder of Jettly says: “Private aviation has resisted marketplace dynamics for two decades because the industry mistook complexity for a moat. The winners of the next 10 years will be the platforms that pair rideshare-grade booking with aviation-grade safety and the operators willing to plug in. A traveller should tap once and see real availability, real pricing and a real, vetted operator. Everything hard about that belongs on our side of the screen, not theirs.”
