Avinode Brings Aviation Professionals Together

Dec 28, 2011 1:50 PM

Avinode Brings Aviation Professionals Together at Avinode Academy

Sweden’s second city played host to a unique event in the last week of November. More than 60 charter aviation professionals flocked to the far north for Avinode Academy, a day of seminars, workshops, and lectures, peppered with opportunities to meet and mingle with peers from around Europe and the Middle East.

“We launched Avinode Academy to provide the members of our web-based charter marketplace with forum for meeting and learning with their peers,” explained Nina Bertilsdotter, Director of Marketing at Avinode. “The Academy is uniquely designed to enable our members to make lasting relationships with other aviation professionals while they learn to use Avinode more effectively for their business.”

The sessions ranged from an in-depth walkthrough of the Avinode marketplace to a look at what’s going on in the skies around the world. By moving from the detailed machinery of the Avinode marketplace out to the more general workings of the global marketplace Academy attendees were given the opportunity to reflect on the synergies between the marketplace and business development.

This year Avinode Academy also played host to two representatives from the industry and mainstream media. Rohit Jaggi, aviation columnist for the Financial Times and Taunya Renson-Martin, publisher and founder of FlyCorporate EMEA & Asia, were both on hand to take part in the event and moderate discussions on how the industry can work together to make air charter available to a wider audience.

“I think the whole industry needs to work together to expand. Otherwise it’s just fighting to slice up the pie into ever smaller pieces,” said Jaggi, “There’s more the industry can do to spread the word about [business aviation] being useful as a business tool and not the luxury, the glitz, the glamour, which is too easy.”

Renson-Martin echoed this concern, touting education as one very important means of reaching out to a new audience and expanding the business aviation market.

“If we’re talking about the sustainability of business aviation as a business, education is a huge part of that,” says Renson-Martin. “One, to educate more people about the benefits of business aviation and bring in another customer base, and secondly, we need to educate regulators because we need to have an environment that allows us to do business where we’re not over-taxed or unfairly judged because people think that it’s purely a luxury and a nice to have, when for many businesses and many business people it is a must-have.”

The Sweden-based technology company plans to bring the popular Avinode Academy event to Miami, Florida in the early summer and then back to Gothenburg next fall.

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