Zuora helps Surf Air know their customers better, enables flexible pricing and packaging, and improves their financial reporting.
Surf Air was launched in 2013 with one route and 3 aircrafts. In just two years, it has grown to 9 aircrafts (with 65 on order), flies to 9 destinations and even has a waitlist for membership. What began as business travel has expanded to include pleasure travel (special events, weekend getaways, etc).

While the growth spike no doubt validated their innovative concept, it created plenty of operational turbulence for the company. “We were pretty in the dark as to where we were in terms of understanding our revenue, how members were paying for their subscriptions, what type of subscription they were on, how did that interact with our in-house reservation system and because they were paying a certain amount, did they have the right level of access in the reservation system. These were all the different pieces of information that we were having a hard time controlling” explains Mac Kern, VP of Commercial Planning at Surf Air.

Zuora worked with Surf Air to provide subscriber insights so they can have a deeper understanding of their members. And then, to meet member needs, we enabled them with easy multi-dimensional pricing and packaging.

“Zuora allowed us to create a wide array of different products and basically manage our members within them. It’s taken a huge weight off of our shoulders going forward in terms of managing what the membership base looks like and what they’re able to do in the reservation system. It’s also really increased our revenue clarity which has been amazing for us” says Kern.

While that’s huge for any company, it’s detrimental for one that’s embarking on its Series C round of funding. Kern echoes the sentiment - “Our reporting in terms of what we’re able to communicate to the board, to future investors, all of that information is now at our fingertips whereas before it was actually tough to come by and a lot of us just honestly didn’t trust it.”

A real disruptor in the aviation industry, Surf Air is often called the ‘Netflix of Aviation’ and the ‘Uber of the Skies’. It’s no surprise that Forbes named it one of ‘America’s 100 Most Promising Companies’ for 2015. Zuora is proud to be a partner.