Rob Wiesenthal: Sure, maybe we’ll do on the repeat flyers, because I have some data on that. But look, we are one of one. Our competition is ground, okay? And if you take a look at the average cost of an Uber right now, the amount of time it takes, you can have an Uber Black that goes between $195 or way over $200 with an airport pass, we’re down to kind of $95 in terms of price. So that is really the alternative that people are looking at. But I’ll also mention that from a marketing perspective, we’re getting those people the moment of truth. We have a marketing venture with Uber where if you are going to or from the airport or to or from a hotel, you will actually get served with an ad that allows you to divert your car to a Blade lounge to take your flight, which is extremely cool, because that’s exactly where you want to do it.
You’re sitting in traffic and all of a sudden you get in the car and you’re worried about how long it’s going to take to the airport. You want that certainty, and you have that ability right through the Uber app to use our marketing message and get have a diversion. And so – and then in terms of the repeat flyers, we’re very happy with the amount of repeat flyers. I think once someone’s gone on Blade over one time, kind of two, going forward, I believe the numbers going back to exception is actually about five times, once they’ve gotten past that from the second point, second trip. And then Will can give you some other views on repeat usage.
Will Heyburn: Yes, we’re not going to give sort of specific numbers, but what I’ll say is that everything that we track, the number of new customers that we’re adding every quarter, that’s increasing substantially year-over-year, the actual number of customers is increasing. The cost that we pay to acquire those customers is going down. And we’re seeing, when we measure in cohorts of newly acquired customers, we’re seeing those cohorts, when we measure over the same period of time, flying more as we continue to retarget folks to fly again. And that’s the most important input right to our lifetime value of the customer model is how many times can we get those folks to fly. So the marketing team has done a fantastic job, making sure that we do continue to take share from ground.
We get people flying again and again, and we get people buying our airport passes, which for $795 a year, you can be flying for as low as $95 a seat. And now you’re beating Uber X most of the time if you’ve got that airport pass. So really excited to see the metrics going the right way. Won’t be sharing kind of metric level CPAs and LTVs, but everything’s moving in the right direction.
Itay Michaeli: Terrific. That’s all very helpful. Thanks.
Operator: Thank you. One moment, please, for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Jon Hickman with Ladenburg Thalmann.
Jon Hickman: Hi. All my questions really have been asked and answered, except is the earn-out from the medical side, is that over now or is that going to continue?
Will Heyburn: This year is the last year of the earn-out.
Jon Hickman: So there will be some – again in Q4?
Will Heyburn: Yes, we’ve been accruing it during the year, and it’s been added back to EBITDA. This is related to the transaction. So you’ll continue to see that accrual just for the next quarter. It’ll be paid in cash in the next year, but you won’t see it again.
Jon Hickman: Okay, thanks.
Operator: Thank you. This concludes our analyst Q&A. I will now turn the call back over to Lee of Blade.
Lee Gold: Thank you. We’re going to start by taking a few questions from our say [ph] Q&A platform. We received a number of questions and we’re going to combine those that have similar themes. Our first question is, how defensible is Blades mode, such as your air rights and first mover advantage?
Rob Wiesenthal: Lee, I’ll take that. And I appreciate the question. I appreciate the opportunity to deal with to answer questions from people on the safe platform. We built this company to create the ecosystem from urban air mobility in all the key markets in the world. And infrastructure is a key part of that, because whether it’s helicopters today or electric critical aircraft tomorrow, if you do as many flights as we do, and our New York airport service is the largest operating urban air mobility effort in the world right now in terms of number of passengers, you need places to aggregate your customers, excess luggage and safely get people on their aircraft and turn those aircraft time and time again really quickly, sometimes in five minute turns.
And in New York City, the biggest market we have, you have the Blade terminal on the east side, the Blade terminal west side. We in fact expanded where we actually have it dedicated to parkers and an arrival lounge on the west side. And that is exclusive in terms of however long the operator is going to be there. They’ve been there for over 38 years. And then we also have kind of geographic exclusivity, I would say, where you have certain terminals where you just can’t build another facility. So we believe our competition is going to have to go through general aviation or find other means of dealing with their passengers. If you want the rule put, you need your own dedicated space. Obviously, what I mentioned in Europe with needs, it’s a concession agreement that allows people to fly from Monaco to Nice.
So when you think about people connecting in Nice, that is a competitive mode as we have that concession from Monaco to Nice where we can actually save an incremental 40 minutes for people to land and then go straight to new gate by doing security helicopter side, so to speak. So this is a core strategy going forward. And as we move from helicopters to electric vertical aircraft, this is something that the competition in electric vertical aircraft and we’ll be using electric vertical aircraft. So, I want to view this as competitive. That’s going to be something that’s going to be important, and something that has real strategic value that you can’t capture in kind of quarter-to-quarter numbers.
Lee Gold: Thank you. We also had a few questions on shareholder value. What is Blade doing to bring value to shareholders? And what are some reasons that shareholders shouldn’t divest given the performance?
