During the Monaco Yacht Show we sat down with Global Eagle’s Senior Vice President of Maritime Ole Sivertsen to talk about their newly established luxury brand, PRIVA by Global Eagle. Established in order to bring the at-home experience to customers whether on land at their private villa or island, at sea on their yacht, or in the air on board their private jets, PRIVA is Global Eagle’s solution to the increasing globalization of UHNWIs.
PRIVA was a natural evolution of the company and the capabilities that we have as an organisation. 50% of our business today is in the media, entertainment and content side – so if you’re ever on a flight there is a high likelihood that it is Global Eagle delivering the movies and licensing the TV shows that you are enjoying. We also do that in the cruise industry and now we have a very diverse organisation with capabilities to deliver content and connectivity across all areas.
We have a very strong business in the maritime side from our past with MTN and we also have a solid business on the land side and the aviation business. So if you combine all of those capabilities and add the demands of the clients from the yacht business, we were able to build a foundation that can then be expanded to meet their needs for seamless and secure connectivity and content delivery across any of their private assets.
We’re living in an age of ‘always on’ and the clients that we are working with in particular don’t think about the complexity, they just want to have it. You just make it work! And that is the advantage that we bring to the table – we have the skills, the experience and the history of doing this with our aviation business, we have our 35 year old legacy in the maritime legacy – we’ve proven again and again that we can do it, so that makes it easy to explain our position.
We don’t have a mass volume product for smaller yachts, so we are only dealing with the largest yachts out there and as a result have to offer an incredibly high level of service. One of the new service programs that we are working on is the PRIVA Technical Concierge. This dedicated concierge level support offers clients direct access to level 2 and beyond specialists. The worst thing you can do is call into a support center and listen to someone asking you to hold the line while they transfer you to someone that knows something about your issue, so we want to have a very high skill level on that first call. If the owner is about to come on board and things are not working you need to speak to someone who is basically a superhero that can calm you down and make things work immediately. We want to have 80% of the calls that come in able to be solved on the first call, and to do that we have developed the 24/7 PRIVA Technical Concierge service to meet the needs of this specific group of client.
We are also doing a lot in the area of innovations and technology. We have capabilities to offer clients up to 400 megabits of capacity and we have done a lot in the area of impacting the quality of experience and how you actually measure it. Everybody is talking about latency and bits and bytes, it doesn’t matter – many of those things are just an excuse for you to accept a less that acceptable experience, so we want to redefine the industry and say that it should really be measured by how you experience the service. How long does it take to load a webpage? Do you ever see the spinning wheel of death when things are buffering? This is our focus.
In short, you should expect to have connectivity as good as you get at home. There are so many people that for leisure or for business, spend a significant part of their life off grid, and that is an important part of our mission, to get that at home feeling from our digital services.
For us in the yacht industry this ties in well with our purpose statement, what we are really here to do is enrich time for our clients. We know that one of the few things our clients can’t buy is time, and time is one of the most precious things that you have so for us we make sure they get the most out of every single minute.