As you wish…

Introducing RISE Wishlist; created to meet your travel needs

I’m admittedly not a very patient person. Although that can sometimes be viewed as a negative (according to my lovely wife), it was my inherent impatience with the highly inefficient and broken airline industry that led me to start RISE.

Since RISE took to the skies ten months ago, we have questioned everything that the airlines have done to take the pleasure out of travel in an attempt to give you back the most valuable commodity in the world — time. The RISE team has done a great job achieving this mission and we know this because we hear from you, our member, on a daily basis about how we are helping you grow your business, be with your family or friends more or just have less stress in your life.

On the flip side, we also hear from you when we aren’t meeting your expectations. Thank you for your unfiltered honesty. Keep it coming. We don’t claim to have all of this figured out and your feedback is needed to continually make RISE better for our members, employees and partners.

One way you can provide us feedback is by helping us help you when it comes to getting the flights you want. Rest assured, we are consistently monitoring capacity in real time and assessing the needs of the growing member base. A key and essential part of that is understanding what your travel needs are.

RISE is NOT an airline. RISE is a real time technology platform that can grow and flex based on member demand. When a flight is unavailable with a commercial airline there’s no way to tell them that you needed that particular flight time. Not the case with RISE. When we launched we enabled a feature called “waitlisting” that enables you to place yourself on a list in the event a space on that flight opens up by clicking on an hourglass icon. However, there is a much deeper and more meaningful purpose behind that icon.

When you try to book a flight and it’s full, that button sends a signal directly to the RISE operations team that you have a need we aren’t meeting. In retrospect, we should have named it something like the “The Magic Button That Sends a Bat Signal to RISE Headquarters”…because that’s almost exactly what it does. By alerting us that you need a particular flight, we are able to gather more intel and analytics as well as make a determination on whether or not we need to add a flight or put a larger aircraft on that route.

That is why, starting this week, we are making some functional changes to the booking tool that will allow you to 1) better view all flights in the system — full or not, and 2) effortlessly place yourself on the newly re-named RISE Wishlist for full flights. Not only does this let you get on the list should a seat open up, it gives us even more valuable insight into your flights needs so we can work behind the scenes to flex and build out this one-of-a-kind flight demand generation platform.