Private Jet Startup Wins Hospitality Pitch Deck Competition
Benjamin Lin, MMH ’25 (left), and Harry Han, MMH ’25, won the Hospitality Pitch Deck Competition for their startup enabling travelers to book private jets online in China. (photo by Rishul Bangar, MMH ’24)
When Harry Han, MMH ’25, launched a travel agency in China in 2018, many of his clients wanted to book a private jet to take a business trip or family vacation. Yet because there was no website or app available to make a reservation, Han found it would take up to four days to confirm a flight.
Even as the pandemic devastated the travel industry, Han, then an undergraduate at Indiana University, saw an opportunity in the charter jet industry. But he didn’t pursue his idea to develop a mobile app to book private jets until this fall, when he met his classmate, Benjamin Lin, MMH ’25, in the Master of Management in Hospitality program at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration.
After researching the charter jet market in China, the team developed a startup called Flaps, which will allow travelers to reserve a private jet online in four minutes. Their proposal won first place in the ninth annual Cornell Hospitality Pitch Deck Competition at Statler Hall on November 5.
“We’re really, really surprised,” Han said after the winners were announced. “I’m at a loss of words right now.”
Twenty-four teams vied for the top prize of $3,000 in the competition, which evaluates the proposals based on the ideas behind the startups, the structure of the arguments, the slide deck presentation, and the delivery of the message.
“This was perhaps the most competitive final in the history of the competition,” said Andrew Quagliata, a senior lecturer in management communication at the Nolan School, who created the competition in 2016. “The quality of the pitches reflects the incredible support our students receive through Cornell’s entrepreneurship ecosystem,” he said.
A difficult task for the judges
Sponsored by the Leland C. and Mary M. Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship, the competition began in September when the teams, comprised of 34 students, began preparing a pitch deck of slides describing their startup proposals. A group of six industry judges narrowed the field down to four finalists, and then a second panel of four judges selected the winner.
“I think all four finalists were excellent — they were just very polished and professional,” said Jason Spillerman ’92, a finals judge and principal of the Vibrant Development group in Philadelphia. “It was a very difficult decision. It was so close for all of us.”
What made Flaps stand out was the quality of its presentation and the work the team had already done in evaluating the private jet market in China. Brad Treat, MBA ’02, visiting lecturer at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management and a pitch deck judge, said he was impressed that the Flaps team could reduce the booking time for a charter jet from four days to four minutes.
“There are some people whose time is so much more valuable that it makes a lot of sense,” he said. “It’s all about efficiency.”
The judges also noted that the Flaps team had talked to 20 charter companies in China about the feasibility of their startup. “I feel like they went out and figured out how to execute it,” said Vikki (Vaswani) Malhotra ’18, a judge who is a strategic operations lead at Uber Eats in New York City. “They obviously had talked to someone in the government. They realized what they needed to do to build it.”
Kaylee Yin ’25 won the second-place prize of $1,500 for her startup pitch for FRUJI Foods, which will upcycle exotic produce into dried fruits that will then be sold to restaurants, hotels and event caterers. Yin is a senior in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
Emma Doherty, MMH ’24, and Francine Aclan, MMH ’24, won the third-place prize of $500 for PYRO, a startup designed to serve restaurants that will convert food waste into a type of renewable fuel called biochar.
Nolan School senior Camilo Ortiz ’25 earned honorable mention for JOUS, a startup focused on producing juice-based beverages designed to mix with spirits.
Moving Flaps to market
Winning the competition will help move Flaps ahead, Han said, because it showed the team that their business concept has potential. This fall, the team secured a commitment from a charter company in China to invest $200,000 in the startup if they can raise another $400,000.
“We have to talk to more potential investors because the development of our software and algorithm will cost a lot,” Han said. “We don’t have those funds yet.”
The team plans to focus its initial rollout of Flaps in China, where they say there is no competitor offering a mobile app to book charter flights. Eventually, they would like to expand into other Southeast Asian countries, into Europe, and then to the United States.
“The Chinese market is actually the most stringent among all the markets,” Han said. “So if we compute an algorithm that works in China, that means our algorithm would actually work in every other country as well.”