Offering aircraft charter, private luxury tours, corporate shuttle, sales, and management services from its base in Switzerland, PrivatAir is a global leader in its field. For decades, the business has been servicing the needs of affluent customers and has since expanded its offering to include plane rentals to other carriers.
Current CEO Greg Thomas is a trained solicitor and started his professional career with Wilde Sapte in London, a law firm specialising in aircraft finance and management buy outs. Although he didn’t realise it at the time, both these areas of expertise would prove to be incredibly useful in the years to come. In 1994, he moved to Switzerland and began work as a lawyer for the wealthy Greek industrialist Latsis Group, which at the time owned PetrolAir, now PrivatAir. In 2001, Greg was appointed to look after the PrivatAir subsidiary as COO and two years later he was promoted to the CEO position.
“When I was first working at the head office as a lawyer, one of the files that was given to me was the application to get a commercial licence for PrivatAir,” Greg recalls. ”Up until that time, it had been a privately run flight department serving just the corporate requirements of the Latsis Group. I was involved in taking PrivatAir from being purely private and serving only corporate customers to becoming commercial and having the ability to sell to the outside world.”
