Velvet Sky, First Car Rental take off today

The rental agency's business is well-segmented in terms of direct consumer, corporate, retail, replacement, tour operator, inbound and film but a market sector that it has not entered until now, is aviation.

Melissa Storey, executive head: strategy, development & marketing, says "This is an exciting partnership and it will assist us in combating seasonality, enabling us to manage and balance our fleet with less risk of high volume last minute up-fleeting or de-fleeting to try and match demand. Car rental is a cyclical business and the purchasing as well as the planning thereof, is crucial to make this contribution model work.

Only the best partners will do

"We take our strategic alliances seriously and adopt an approach that selects the best partners to grow with. We firmly believe in mutually beneficial relationships, focussing on each partner's strengths, leveraging each opportunity that presents itself, and this will be the case with the airline, which shares similar beliefs."

"A low cost airline like this presents us with an opportunity to become the preferred car rental company of its daily direct consumer and corporate SME base and a stable, less seasonal domestic base. It presents us with the ability to reach a captive and targeted audience."

"We can provide the airline with an existing customer base, the majority of whom fly to a local destination before they collect a car. We will expose the product to them and ensure that we enable our loyal customers to become theirs. We have agreed to make all our channels available to our new exclusive airline partner so that it can catapult into the market."

Dual branding

"Both brands share similarities in their logo palette, being predominately purple and this will make the creative process of dual branding campaigns easy on the eye and a pleasure to create - this is an advantage, but just the start of great things to come," she concludes.

Airline services will commence with one plane, flying the Durban/ Johannesburg route twice a day and Johannesburg/ Cape Town route once a day. The airline intends to have three planes in the sky by June 2011, which will include a Durban / Cape Town route.

For more, visit: http://www.flyvelvetsky.com/