Good day to all of you listening in, and thank you for taking the time to join us. My name is Davis Sunderland, and I cover sustainable energy and mobility here at Baird with my partner Ben Kallo. We're very happy to have CEO and Director of Blade Air Mobility, Rob Wiesenthal, here with us today. We're going to turn things over for a brief high-level overview of Blade and go into kind of a fireside chat format. I first just want to say if there are any questions from the audience during the presentation, you can either email them in through the platform or email me directly at dsunderland@rwbaird.com. With that, maybe I will turn it over to you, Rob, for a little introduction.
Great, thanks, Davis, and I appreciate you and Baird inviting me today and for all the people who are tuning in. We're about to enter our 10th year at BLADE, and the whole thesis of BLADE, going back to 2014, was to build the ecosystem for the eventual arrival of what we call electric vertical aircraft, or what you may think is eVTOL. The strategy that we took is different than any other company out there. That was to use conventional rotorcraft today and do that on an asset-light basis and transition to EVA when they become available. So investors would have the ability to invest in a profitable and growing ecosystem. Then when EVA arrives, we would be supercharged by a terrific brand, great routes, terminals.
I'm happy to say that, you know, the plan we've stuck to the plan, and it clearly seems to be working in a variety of different ways. So let's talk about what all those pieces are. There's obviously long-term agreements with all our aircraft operators. We have a seven-member safety team. You have to use our technology platform, which is consumer-to-cockpit, our branding on your aircraft, and you have a non-compete with BLADE. In exchange for that, we'll guarantee usually a certain number of hours, and we do that at a very, you know, to BLADE at a very favorable cost. Then we have the infrastructure, which we're now in New York, the New York area. We're in Miami. We're in all of Southern Europe from Monaco, Cannes, Nice, Saint-Tropez, Courchevel, Geneva. We're in India, and we're also in Western Canada between Victoria and Vancouver.
Infrastructure is important because that is where you aggregate passengers. When you think about one of our highest velocity businesses, which has been fastest growing, which is BLADE Airport here in New York, 28 million people go between the airport and Manhattan each year by car. We're now in the tens of thousands of people by helicopter flying 6 hours a day. Excuse me, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. That requires a lot of movement through these lounges, both security, baggage assessment, weight and balance, all of this stuff. You need your own secure facility to do that. Given that most heliports are private and not public, there really aren't places where you can aggregate that, and it's a critical part of the puzzle.
Frankly, part of the reason why when Uber tried to compete with us a number of years ago with over 2.5 million people on their app in New York City, and we had a fraction of that, we were doing 10 times over the volume, and they eventually pulled out. You have the infrastructure. We talked about the aircraft deals. We have a consumer-to-cockpit technology. Everything from in the cockpit, computing weight and balance, so pilots know exactly how much they need to fuel and can turn the aircraft quickly and know where their next missions are. Dashboards that we have at operators so they can see what flights there are. Just a logistics platform here that coordinates that with our operations team.
Even things like on the accounting side, where we invoice and we pay within 5 days faster than almost any other kind of customer of these businesses. So we have about 29 operators, you know, on our program. Then obviously we have the consumer-facing app as well as the last piece of that technology stack, which enables you to book a helicopter up to 20 minutes before a flight. And then along with that, obviously a very strong brand, especially in key markets like the South of Europe and in Manhattan, BLADE is kind of like the Kleenex of helicopters. It is the strongest branding of vertical transportation today. The routes, hundreds of thousands of flyers. And so the idea is all that, what's going to change, just that asset you're flying on.
So for instance, when you're flying to the airport, it's going to be five minutes today, five-eight minutes today in a helicopter. It's going to be five-eight minutes in an EVA. The big difference is that that electric vertical aircraft are quiet and emission-free. And what that does, it unlocks more places for us to land and depart from. So if I can land a couple blocks away from where Davis lives, that's much more useful to him than if he has to get in a car or taxi and go 20 minutes to a BLADE vertiport. So right now, for Manhattan, for instance, which is probably the largest helicopter market in the world at this point, you know, we have the West Side. We have the East Side, BLADE Lounge West, BLADE Lounge East, and Wall Street, all on the outskirts. There's nothing in between.
Years ago in the 1970s, people used to land on what was known as the Pan Am Building. It's now the MetLife Building. I think once EVA is here, there will be additional landing zones because the only thing stopping it is noise. Once we get rid of the noise of the aircraft, we know that local legislators, the FAA, you know, local community groups, they'll be much more open to having these landing zones because every city, to be competitive in, you know, the coming years, will need an urban air mobility strategy. There is no question. There's too much congestion on the ground. It will be expensive to start, but it will work its way down. That's why BLADE has always started as a high-end business. When we started this business, the average ticket price was, you know, or checkout price was in the low thousands of dollars.
Now people fly for as little as $95 to the airport with an annual pass. So that was the core of the business until about 2018. Then we quickly noticed that we had a great opportunity in organ movements. We saw our local hospitals here in New York literally using ambulances to go to Teterboro and then taking private jets, say, to Philadelphia Hospital to retrieve an organ and then bring it back for transplant. So that required an ambulance to Teterboro, a jet from Teterboro to Philadelphia, an ambulance back from that hospital with the organ and the doctors, that jet trip back to Teterboro, then another ambulance back to Langone as an example. That would be a $60,000 trip. Now we can fly directly between those two hospitals, landing on the hospitals, and that could be a $6,000 trip.
As a result, this has been the fastest growing part of our business and the most profitable. Today, about 60% of our revenues are in the medical business. It's actually bigger than our passenger business. Also, they're very much linked. Because the same helicopters that we use during the day for passengers between 12:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M. are doing organ movements, which means our operators can now amortize the costs of their pilots, their maintenance, their hangars, their insurance over 24 hours a day as opposed to 12 hours a day. It's kind of a win-win for everybody, and it decreases the hourly rate we pay for aircraft as well. Now we have actually moved on to not only helicopters, but jets and what we call lights and sirens SUVs. We are today the largest air transporter of human organs in the United States.
That is our quick overview.
Covered a lot of ground there. Thank you for that, and thank you for setting the table. Maybe if I could work backwards, you mentioned the price and how pricing has come down and what the rates that you're able to offer and how competitive that may be. Could you just expand on that and maybe how your pricing compares to something like an Uber Black, which is a common, I don't know if that's the right way to think about competition, but commonly cited alternative?
Absolutely. So let's take a look at New York to start, and we can talk about Europe if you want as well. We are almost all-time comparable to Uber Black. During rush hour, sometimes we'll even beat UberX . And we're turning these 2-hour drives into 5-8-minute flights. And then I think because there's so much commuting going on, not only for people who go to the airport a lot, but what a lot of people don't really appreciate is the fact that most of the traffic when you think about New York City, you know, Manhattan is an island. There are people coming from New Jersey or Long Island coming into the city. So we actually now are starting to see people using BLADE to commute. They'll go to Kennedy Airport. They'll park their car for free where the BLADE terminal is.
They'll fly in, and they'll do it for $95 because they paid $7.95 for an annual airport pass. The same thing in New Jersey. Park the car at Newark Airport, go to the BLADE Lounge in Newark Airport, one of the only helicopter lounges in the world besides the other ones that we have in Europe. Fly to Manhattan. You have those commuters, and you have the people who are actually taking flights. That is our only competition. No one offers the buy-the-seat service that we offer to the airport. We compete with ground. That is our big competition. I think that, you know, you may say, well, why would anybody, you know, take a car when they could take a helicopter, you know, for approximately the same price? Number one, I would say it's a good question.
But to the same thing that I was saying about before, we are not that geographically desirable to everyone. So if you're in Hudson Yards where 50,000 people live, work, and recreate, our West Side heliport is across the street, literally. You could have lunch in Hudson Yards at 12:30 P.M. and literally catch a 2:30 P.M. plane out of Kennedy or Newark. That is unheard of with a car. And on the East Side, people who maybe live on the East Side or maybe they work on, you know, Park Avenue, South of Park Avenue, that's really convenient. But there are a lot of dead zones like Upper Manhattan, or if you're going to Newark, which is not that far away, you're down in TriBeCa. Where you're saying to yourself, well, you know what? I might as well just get in a car.
So we've been working very hard to try to get those more tertiary customers. And frankly, we see the benefit. The airlines see the benefit. We have a big deal with JetBlue where they bought a bank of seats from BLADE. And now today, if you for a limited amount of time, but full-time for Mosaic customers, Mosaic 4 customers, Mosaic Plus customers get, I believe, four flights for free. Mosaic customers get a lesser amount. TrueBlue customers get a discount. And if you fly Mint, which is their equivalent of Business First, from LA for anywhere to JFK, it is bundled with your flight. You get a complimentary flight to or from the city. So I think more and more people are seeing the value. Clearly, while we do advertising, word of mouth is the biggest, you know, kind of catalyst to new flyers. It's a great product.
Got to try it. There's also a lot of brand revenues associated with it. When you land, for instance, at Kennedy Airport, you know, Mercedes pays us for the right to drive you and actually a Mercedes- Maybach straight to your terminal. In Europe, we've actually bought. We have our own security for helicopters behind the tarmac in Nice Airport. So when you land in Nice Airport and you want to go back to the United States, you land, you clear security by the helicopter, and you go straight to the gate. You save up to 40 minutes. We don't even do that in the United States yet. I think that's going to happen. I'm glad to see the airlines are getting much more interested in what we do. They're much more interested in electric vertical aircraft as well.
Right now, we're the only people doing this, as I would say, in the wild. You have a lot of manufacturers who are talking about potentially doing it, but right now they've got to focus on building their aircraft, paying for them, assembling them, selling them, and getting certified, obviously. Then they will move on to hopefully starting to offer services themselves. Or most likely, since we've had conversations with almost all of them, selling our operators, you know, given, you know, hourly backstops by us, their aircraft so we can use them.
You mentioned the Nice Airport, and you also mentioned Europe earlier. Could you maybe just expand a bit about your footprint there, how you entered the market, which I believe was the acquisition, but maybe why you went through that strategy and what the growth opportunities are there?
Sure. So we acquired the retail passenger business of Monacair, Héli Sécurité, and Azur Hélicoptère, representing three out of the four competitors in the region. As a U.S. company, we can't actually buy the operator. So we had to do deals like this. So we call the iron; the aircraft is still owned by Monacair. And, you know, it's a very entrenched business. You know, the royal family in Monaco was the majority shareholder of Monacair. They've been around for many, many years. It took a long time to get this deal done. And so I don't think going there cold would be able to get us to the position that we need and the speed that we need. I think, you know, last year there were a bunch of integration issues. I think finally we have the right team in place.
We hired, you know, a senior executive who was at the precursor travel agency of Amex GBT, who's native from France, as well as the COO. So I think that we're in a really good position to kind of grow from here. But it is a complicated market, but a fantastic market. We like to say, you know, BLADE works in places where you're either, you know, geographically contested or highly congested. So it doesn't, you know, when you see companies saying we're going to fly from Orlando Airport to downtown Orlando, that's not a product. All right? They have 10-lane superhighways that they built a decade or two decades ago. It's 20 minutes to get here. You need real traffic. You will never see from BLADE until way in the distance of, you know, thousands of landing zones with EVA, a map that shows dots all over the world.
We believe that currently, with the infrastructure in place, by the sea, vertical transportation makes sense in Western Canada, Northeast United States, and Southern Europe. We also have a joint venture in India that's a little bit of an outlier because actually our partners in India can build new heliports. We can't do that here in the United States, and that can't really be done in Europe.
That's actually a great question. I was going to go back to the point you made earlier about landing pads. What is the process for expansion of the areas that you're able to fly to? Maybe the best way to cut it is geographically. I'm sure it's different in the US, like you mentioned, versus elsewhere. Is there an optimal number? Or I guess, at what point is the growth where you would start to shift the focus to maintaining instead of continuing to expand?
Well, everything right now, to be completely blunt with you, until EVA arrives and we have more landing zones, it's, say, for instance, within New York, 28 million people going by car. We're in the tens of thousands. We're competitive with Uber Black. Clearly, we should be able to get into the low millions, from my perspective. I don't see why. We have the current infrastructure that could handle that. And in Europe, I think there, you know, the pricing is comparable. And I think it's becoming much more of a year-round, less seasonal market. I think that opportunity is there as well. It's really about going deeper. Then once EVA is here, there'll be expansion within these hubs.
So I believe that, you know, for those who are on the call who know New York City and Manhattan, we talked about BLADE Lounge East, BLADE Lounge West, and Wall Street. If there was one zone, landing zone just south of Central Park, but maybe north of the Port Authority, that gives you that connectivity from East Side to Midtown, from Midtown to West Side, Midtown to Wall Street, and then Midtown to the airports, that could be exponentially grow the size of this business. That's only going to happen when it is unlocked by EVA because of the emission-free and quiet nature of those aircraft.
Maybe if we could switch gears just a little bit to looking more at the financial profile. I know you've mentioned being able to offer very competitive rates from a lower cost structure versus competition. Maybe let's start there as far as what leads to lower costs and what do margins or what does the target business model look like?
Sure. You know, on our mature routes, we're running 30%-35% margins, flight margins, which is essentially the cost of the flight that we pay the operators, which includes fuel, insurance, the pilots, maintenance, everything, and including the cost of the landing fee. Subtracting that out from what we charge, the revenues we get for, whether it's, you know, the number of seats sold on an aircraft or on a charter, you know, charter based to the full price of the aircraft. I think that, you know, that's a mature route. The less mature routes are probably closer to 20%. Medical is, you know, kind of low 20%, 22%. 22% is probably what we're trying to achieve on a flight margin basis. And what drives that is volume. Okay? Because essentially you have this fixed cost of owning and operating aircraft that's, which is the burden of the operator.
But once you've gotten through that, you're only dealing with what we call DOC, direct operating costs, which is really just, you know, maintenance, fuel, and the pilot. So a lot of our deals have drop-down rates. We pay on an hourly basis where, you know, you could have a rate that goes from $1,600 an hour to closer to $1,000 an hour based on the number of hours we do. The trick is to be competitive when you're just getting started. And luckily, we're now at the scale, especially when you combine the medical missions at night with the passenger missions during the day. We're now at the scale to have rates that can help us enjoy margins that can handle our employee costs, our marketing, and all the things that we require to grow.
On that last bit that you were talking about with employee costs, marketing, how much of the cost structure is customer acquisition costs and going out and growing that flyer base?
I think that, you know, it's probably best way to say this. It is there's certain markets where we have 100% market share and we're extremely well known, like our leisure markets in the Northeast, like whether it be East Hampton, Southampton, Montauk, Sag Harbor. We've been doing it for years. We have 100% market share. There used to be competitors. We, you know, usually have done deals with them to kind of roll them up, their passengers at least, and use their aircraft into our business where we don't need to do any marketing. The vast majority of passenger marketing is done for our airport product. And we're really in growth phase, you know, right now.
But when I take a look at the overall marketing budget versus total passenger revenues, it's a very low single-digit % of revenues that we're putting towards, you know, media buying, you know, which tends to be, you know, mostly digital and a little bit of outdoor internals at airports and, you know, a little bit of connected TV and linear TV.
When we think about growing the business further, you mentioned acquisition to kind of roll up other passengers and slowly fold the aircraft in. Is this typically the type of acquisition you would look for to just gain a new geography base or a new customer base?
No, I think we're done with the geographies for now until EVA. So it's really going to be that going deeper and not spending that money on an acquisition, but just getting more and more customers. However, in medical, we see tons of tuck-in acquisitions. We're really good at M&A. You know, my background is I was responsible for most of the M&A at Sony Corporation between 2000 and 2013. I was the head of M&A for media and entertainment at First Boston in the '90s. And then, you know, our CFO comes from a private equity background, actually with RedBird Capital, who's actually on our board. So we're pretty good at M&A. You know, while we did start our medical business organically, we did buy Trinity Medical, which ended up being a fantastic acquisition that kind of started at 12x EBITDA.
And we bought our way down to 3x EBITDA or, you know, earned our way out of it to down to 3x. So it's been fantastic. We've had quarters that we had over 100% quarter-over-quarter growth. There's no marketing costs associated with that business. There are a lot of long-term contracts with the hospitals. And again, we're the largest with, you know, very few what we view as viable competitors. But we see the ability to get into other parts of the medical side. That can be, you know, services that help hospitals decide whether an organ is suitable for transplant based on the needs of their patients. I already talked about the expansion into, you know, lights and sirens SUVs and into jets. And there are a lot of other ancillary businesses that are associated with the transplant ecosystem that we're really excited about.
Those tend to be very low single-digit multiple businesses and easy to snap on to our existing platform.
Medical is a business that obviously seems a bit more inelastic just with the very pronounced need, but looking more at the leisure business and zooming in maybe on the near-term outlook, have you seen any slowdown with broad talk of a wider recession or I guess is your customer base more immune to this or how do we think about demand elasticity?
I think it's interesting. Yes. Yes, our customer, especially on the leisure routes, are much more immune to, you know, the vagaries of the economy. But however, there is an ultra high-end, which is actually a really big business of people who own and charter their own large aircraft that will, in order to save money, will actually move down to BLADE where maybe they owned an aircraft or they charter their own large aircraft and they'll say, you know what, I'm going to buy a seat in an amphibious seaplane or I'll buy a seat in a helicopter.
So when we do see that, we usually see people come down from, you know, owning a share is the best way to say it, owning it, not almost like someone moving from like a NetJets to going chartering on their own or buying a seat on some type of carrier. So that kind of gets negated a little bit. So we don't really see the impact on that. Where we thought we would see impact would be on the airport business because it's a lower-priced product. I think because the growth is so fast, it's very difficult for us to see. Because requiring so many customers and the penetration is still low versus the number of people who use it. Don't really see that here in the U.S.
In Europe, there was definitely a period of time, as you would imagine, two years ago where we lost a lot of business from Russians who were spending time in the south of France. They have really come back in droves. A lot of you, we can see that right now with the customers that are flying between Geneva and Courchevel, which is our big winter route. So it, you know, for every negative, there seems to be a positive to bring it out. So nothing dramatic, but we do, I want to be clear though, I do, we did see signs of the ultra-wealthy kind of moving down a notch to using services like BLADE.
That's very interesting. What percentage of your flyers are repeat flyers? If that's something you quantify?
Yeah. It depends, you know, on the routes. With airport, if someone flies a second time, they'll fly five times within that year. But we do have a lot of growth in terms of people who, you know, that number gets brought down by the growth of so many people trying in for the first time. In addition, because it's now known much more globally, we have a lot of people who may come here once or twice a year from all over the world. You know, which is a growing piece of our business as opposed to people who live in New York or go to New York on a, you know, a constant basis. But what I can tell you though is the best way of looking at repeat customers for airport is, well, I can't give you the number.
One of our fastest growing products is the airport pass, which when you make that decision, you have to be pretty sure you're going to fly more than 8 times in 1 year to make that pass economic to you. For leisure routes like the Hamptons, there is because people have houses and they have a cadence of going there every single weekend. You know, there's a very big cohort of people who are, you know, flying more than 8-10 times or more a season.
Makes sense. I guess now in our last 90 seconds or so, just pivoting the focus to upcoming milestones, what to watch for in 2024. I know or I believe you guys are reporting earnings in the very near future. Is there anything else that we should be looking for as potential catalysts or things to monitor?
So we'll be announcing our year-end earnings. Last quarter was our first profitable quarter on an adjusted EBITDA basis. And we've never given guidance before. And we will be giving full-year guidance on both revenue and profitability for both 2024 and 2025. So, you know, we're looking forward to giving Wall Street and our investors, you know, real meat to chew on so they understand the same excitement that we have about our company. And hopefully that they agree with us. So we're looking forward to that earnings call and, you know, we have a great cash balance of approximately roughly $170 million, $174 I think was the last quarter. So we have a lot and no debt. So we have a lot of cash that we are ready to deploy on a prudent basis. Probably on what we consider low-risk tack-on acquisitions on the medical side.
We see, you know, the economics and the growth potential and the, you know, the immunity to recession and other external issues being really, really strong. So that's a huge focus of the company now that it's much bigger. And when we take a look at the, you know, the current stock price and you subtract out the cash, it clearly is not where it should be trading in our estimation and almost anyone's estimation, but let's view that as an opportunity for the investors and we'll take it from there.
Sounds great. This has been wonderful. Thank you for the time, Rob. We'll leave it at that.