Ethics: In The Charter Industry

Desert Jet's main focus for the company surrounds its values. These values include caring for the customer, for each other, and providing the best customer experience. After speaking with the President of Desert Jet, I have discovered that ethics in the workplace is not a major issue here. With regards to ethics Denise Wilson, founder of Desert Jet states, "Ethics are not a big issue, if a problem arises I manually address the issue. I find that if you hire the right people there is little need for an ethics policy. As the company grows, I may have to implement an ethics policy, but at the time one is not needed."

As far as the industry goes, there are some ethical procedures that all charter companies are supposed to follow. One major ethical issue is the poaching of clients. It becomes an ethical issue because, while you are not allowed to poach another operators client, the passenger has ever right to know who is flying them. After a major accident involving an airline crash, where a United flight was being operated by Skywest, litigation was made stating that the passenger has the right to know which operator they are flying under. Therefore, the ticket could not read United. It would now have to read Skywest, doing business with United.As such in the charter industry if Blue Star Jets sends a client to Desert Jet, they are required to tell the passenger they are flying under Desert Jet.

It is a shared idea that if you are flying another brokers or charter operators client, that you do not purposefully sell your company to that client. Therefore, you would not hand them a business card or you would not tell that they could receive cheaper flights by coming directly to your company. However, it becomes a problem when the client really enjoys the flight and asks what the company name is. This can cause a huge meltdown between charter operators and brokers causing harsh feelings about stealing clients. From what I understand, as long as you are not selling your company to a passenger dealing with a broker or another operator, you are being ethical. After the flight, if the client logs onto your website and requests a quote, that is not considered unethical, as long as you did not tell the client to log on to your website. They did it on their own free will, therefore it is not considered poaching. There are several known companies that do poach clients, most operators refuse to send their clients on such flights, as they know they will lose there customer. Desert Jet has dealt with several companies with such unethical behavior and such companies they no longer do business with.