1. AirStudent: Giving peers "wings" to fly

By Niémah Davids & Karin van Laeren

Ndabenhle Ntshangase and Lwanda Shabalala co-founded the student-centred travel business AirStudent.

AirStudent identifies students that study far away from their hometown and have to travel to and from campus at the start and end of each term. It then groups students together based on their travel similarities to capitalise on certain cost-effective commercial bulk-buying booking principles.

Where did your idea for AirStudent come from?

NDABENHLE: I am from Vryheid in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), and studying at UCT meant that I was always travelling between campus and home at the end of each term. This travelling cost escalates fast and gets very expensive. I realised that I wasn’t the only one going through this process – approximately 60% of students study outside of their hometown.

I put pen to paper and came up with the idea to start AirStudent – and plug a huge gap. AirStudent’s role is to group travelling students like myself together in order to leverage the bulk-buying principles that exist, and to provide students with more affordable travelling fare options.

What have been some of the highlights of AirStudent so far?

LWANDA: I am personally excited and inspired by the real impact our network has had on actual traveling students. Not only from a price point of view but also in terms of safety and convenience. COVID-19 has reinforced the importance of well-coordinated and managed travel which has resulted in collaborations with various institutions and university stakeholders that has fast-tracked and elevated the work we do.

How has AirStudent grown or changed since its inception?

NDABENHLE: Having started as a Whatsapp group with about 10 students, it has changed quite a bit. At first, we believed we would use Whatsapp to put together groups of traveling students in order to give them cheaper flights, but as we went along, we realised that the platform has potential to be more than that. We now look to create a network of travelling students who leverage their numbers and technology to unlock great benefits and cheaper travel, while also creating opportunities for themselves. These opportunities come through programmes like our driver and affiliation networks, where students can earn either by driving our groups between residences and the airport or simply by getting other students to join the AirStudent network. As we grow we plan to create more opportunities like this.

What are your goals with AirStudent for the next three years?

LWANDA: A big part of what we look to do is create enabling infrastructure and ecosystems that break down the barriers to opportunity. This goes beyond our effort to enhance student mobility and looks at creating valuable opportunities for all students and stakeholders, driving mutual business advantage. Some of our goals for the next three years are to develop and grow this enabling infrastructure to have students easily plug into our offering and drive value. This includes realising and expanding our exciting vision for our peer-to-peer RideShare, AirStay and affiliate programmes.

NDABENHLE: We want to create as many jobs as we can. With the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment in the country has taken a further knock. It’s naive of us to think that AirStudent will be able to hire all of the unemployed youth, but all we want to do is contribute to boosting employment figures, and a start-up like ours is the best way to do that.

Have you collaborated with travel-industry partners?

NDABENHLE: The same way it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to grow a business. And our village stepped up for us. AirStudent has established a partnership with Comair, which allows us to get affordable flight prices, as well as the 20 kg free luggage. When COVID-19 hit our shores and Comair was negatively affected, they assisted us to build a solid partnership with FlyMango in order for our business to continue servicing students. We’ve also collaborated with Greyhound buses to cater for those students who prefer to travel by bus. Working with these leading industry partners is testament to our growth.

What advice can you give to students and graduates with an idea for a business?

NDABENHLE:

1. Think big but start small. Think of the simplest thing you can do right now to reach your end goal and start there.

2. Find people you can enjoy working with and then grow with them.

3. Remember that no one really knows what they’re doing, so trust and believe in yourself more than anything else. This confidence in yourself will help you in many situations on your journey.

www.airstudent.co.za@airstudentSA