Introducing the Skyjet App, a First for Apple Pay

Working in technology, we love to be involved in industry firsts, especially when there’s an obvious benefit. Today, we’re pleased to share that the Skyjet app, the first private jet charter app for iPhone to support Apple Pay, is now available on the iOS App Store.

For the user, that means you’re now just a few taps from finding and booking a charter flight — all from your iPhone.

Skyjet, also available via traditional phone calls and on the web, has been offering online booking of chartered flights since 1997. The New York-based company’s mission is to simplify private jet travel for both personal and business reasons, offering short hops and coast-to-coast trips.

With the new iPhone app, Skyjet offers clients a way to quickly and easily search for travel options and real-time pricing estimates, get firm quotes and book travel. The Skyjet app also displays itinerary information including ground transportation, airport details, catering arrangements, and more. And should the user need anything before, during, or after their trip, the app gives them one-tap access to Skyjet’s team of on-demand travel experts.

“I’m really happy with the quality and design of the app developed by ArcTouch,” said Greg Richman, president of Skyjet. “The team delivered an incredibly simple and intuitive app that we think is going to be a boon for our business. We’re already getting lots of compliments from our clients.”

The Skyjet App project 411

As with many projects, one of the biggest development challenges with the Skyjet app was e-commerce. In addition to Apple Pay, the app also supports major credit cards and wire transfers. Addressing the nuances of these different types of payments took a lot of great coordination between Skyjet’s back-end team, the ArcTouch team, and the merchant processors. For the Apple Pay component, we had our engineers present during Apple’s WWDC 2015 Apple Pay lab sessions and working directly with Apple’s developer relations team, who were invaluable throughout the project.

The other big challenge was a compressed schedule that spanned all our mobile app development services. The project timeline of three months — six weeks of design and 10 weeks of engineering, including some overlap of those phases — was aggressive so the app could be available to Skyjet’s customers during their peak travel season (the post-summer, back-to-work timeframe) in September.

We worked closely with Skyjet and followed our lean app development process – identify an app’s MVP feature set to include only the most important features in this first release. The design team did efficient and beautiful work, iterating rapidly through a number of options to arrive at an intuitive user flow and interface design. The engineering team carried that momentum forward in swiftly executing on the design vision, while working through the various technology barriers — including the implementation of Apple Pay.

Try the Skyjet App for free

I’m extremely proud of the entire team for striking the right balance between working efficiently to deliver the project on time, and delivering the type of premium custom app that our customers have come to expect..

The Skyjet app is available for free on the App Store. If you’re looking for a private chartered flight, try it out and tweet to us to let us know what you think.