Financial health, security and your next charter flight

Booking your next charter flight can be nerve-wracking. With so many different options, so many different prices and so many different charter agencies, how do you decide who to do business with?

At Stratos Jet Charters Inc., our main priority is to give our clients the best service at the best possible price. Our focus is not on making a profit, but building long-term relationships with our clients and protecting them from the less trust-worthy service providers with poor financial histories.

Keeping that in mind, we feel that the best way to prove this commitment to our clients is to provide them with solid evidence of our strong financial welfare. We want our clients to feel confident that the people they to do business with are financially strong and healthy. That’s why Stratos Jets voluntarily submitted our company to an audit by Dun & Bradstreet, the world’s leading source of commercial information and insight for businesses.

Stratos Jets proved in the recent audit that our company is a financially healthy one. Our overall financial standing was rated as “strong,” our D & B Paydex payment score (how quickly our bills are paid) was rated “prompt” and our commercial credit score (predictor of severe payment delinquency) was at the lowest score possible of “1.”

You might be asking yourself right now how a company’s financial stability affects your charter flight. The answer is simple – it affects everything. Perhaps, it’s better explained through an example.

As you may recall, a short time ago, a well-known jet card and charter brokerage firm (which will remain anonymous, out of respect to the business) nearly went out of business because of a bad decision, poor financial health and a down-turning economy with a lower demand for charter flights.

All of these factors combined could have led to the company’s near-demise but the most damaging factor was the firm’s decision to buy a new, separate charter company and attempt to merge the two into one.

What happened was fairly quickly after the merger, the newly formed charter company experienced cash-flow problems. Suddenly, there wasn’t enough money to pay vendors for their services and the company’s financial health suffered greatly as a result. The company cited the difficulties merging the two companies’ various accounting systems as the cause.

Had the company had the foresight to keep a closer eye on its financial well-being from the start, it’s possible that these problems would never have occurred. Charter flights would have run more smoothly and clients would have known that their business transactions were sound.

At Stratos Jets, we feel that every company should take the time to review its own financial standing and provide that information to its clients. Every client deserves to know what kind of business they’re dealing with.

After all, would you want to loan money to someone who had a tendency not to pay people back? Would you want to do business with a company that couldn’t pay their vendors for services?

With that being said, we invite our clients to review our recent D & B financial audit. We want our clients to feel confident that choosing Stratos Jets is the best choice. We also like to entreat other private jet charter agencies to do the same, and provide their clients with information from a financial self-audit.

Booking your next charter flight doesn’t have to be nerve-wracking. Not when you can trust in your company’s financial well-being 100 percent.

Joel Thomas – President, Stratos Jet Charters