In the wake of COVID-19, our entire industry must rethink the way we do things. This will result in revised procedures, more processes to follow, more documentation, increased admin burden, and enhanced vendor vetting—adding more complexity to our world. There are going to be many “cracks” that we need to navigate together as a community when demand for international flying resumes.
With our expertise in directly managing the core logistical phases of the mission most challenged by the COVID-19 epidemic—FBO ground services, inflight catering, and chauffeured ground transportation—we’ve developed health and safety standards for these operating domains based on guidance published by the CDC, FDA, IATA, NBAA, WHO and others:
We’ve implemented these enhanced standards at our own locations, and we’ve leveraged our strong relationships with our preferred third-party providers to get their commitment to follow these standards at the top 100 destinations that our Universal® Trip Support customers fly.
These standards not only elevate health and safety procedures across our supply chain, but also reduce admin burden and lost time for both our customers and preferred third-party providers. We’re transparently publishing them here so that our customers can have them for their safety programs, as well as to make them available for the industry to use.
In addition, we expect these standards to evolve over time as our community’s shared understanding of best practices for managing crew and passenger safety within the mission changes – so we are very open to feedback for how we can be better.
Read our official announcement.
Below is an overview of the practices we are following on every mission, ground support reservation, catering order, and ground transportation booking you entrust with us.
For all missions managed by Universal® Trip Support, more than 80% of our preferred third-party providers at the top 100 destinations where our customers travel have committed to follow our enhanced COVID-19 health and safety standards. These include providers for:
Adherence to these standards will be monitored and assessed based on our post-trip review process with our customers as well as through our ongoing strong, working relationships with these preferred providers.
In addition to the above, we’re performing additional screening on hotel bookings to determine the following:
In addition, we are working with many of these hotel groups at a leadership level to obtain the very latest information to share with our clients, and they are aware of our need for the highest of standards.
Across our Universal Aviation® FBO Ground Services network – as well as across our preferred third-party ground handler network –, we’re rethinking the entire ground experience. Passengers and crew are less interested in facility amenities now, and they are more concerned with ground time velocity and reducing risk of exposure.
At each of our locations, we’ve been focusing extensively on passenger and crew traffic flow analysis to increase speeds where we can, reduce possible points of contact once they leave the aircraft, and perform before-and-after sterilization of physical touchpoints that we control.
Learn more on the Universal Aviation website.
Within our owned-and-operated kitchens, we’ve scrutinized the chain of custody for the food we serve our clients – from sourcing and receiving, to preparing and delivery – in order to develop our enhanced health and safety standards.
Learn more on the Air Culinaire Worldwide website.
At Drivania Chauffeurs, we have COVID-19 safety profiles completed for more than 500 ground transportation providers around the globe. We can tell you the exact procedures each are following, and we can confirm they have all met our minimum requirements.
We are also conducting pre-trip reviews on every booking made through our platform to ensure that the vendors we are trusting our customers with are complying with our standards.
Universal remains committed to supporting our industry during this time of unprecedent global crisis.