May 9, 2023

The board of directors of Wheels Up Experience today appointed Ravi Thakran as the company’s Executive Chairman. It also announced that Chief Financial Officer Todd Smith will be interim Chief Executive and launched a search for a new CEO to replace company founder Kenny Dichter.

New York based Wheels Up’s reservation platform, which is linked to a flight management system, enables its roughly 13,000 members to search, book, and fly privately. In 2022, the company flew more than 150,000 passengers, using its access to over 1,500 owned, managed, and third-party partner aircraft. The average revenue per flight is around $15,000.

In addition to private flights, Wheels Up offers membership programs, aircraft management, aircraft sales, solutions for corporate travel and commercial travel benefits through a partnership with Delta Air Lines. Delta owns a fifth of Wheels Up.

Thakran faces major challenges in the highly competitive and capital-intensive business. In 2022, Wheels Up lost $555 million on $1.6 billion in revenues and analysts forecast it will lose $250 million or more in 2023. While it owes $220 million in long term debt, and has about $300 million in cash, its major liability is that it has collected $975 million in pre-payments from members for future flights.

The company may have to file for bankruptcy, analysts say, to try to erase much of its liabilities. In fact, Wheels Up’s stock market value reflects this prospect: it has collapsed to $105 million from around $2 billion in February 2021.

In 2020, Aspirational Consumer, with Thakran as Chairman and CEO, raised $225 million for a Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicle, or blank check company, through a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The next year, Aspirational merged with Wheels Up, which was founded in 2013 by Kenny Dichter, a serial entrepreneur. Thakran joined the board of Wheels Up, following the merger. Wheels Up stock owned by Thakran and other founding investors of Aspirational was then valued at about $60 million.

Ravinder Singh (Ravi) Thakran, 59 years old, earlier served as the Group Chairman of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessey Group (LVMH) South and South East Asia and Australia/New Zealand. LVMH’s portfolio includes over 75 luxury brands in wine, spirits, fashion, leather goods, perfumes, cosmetics, watches and jewelry including Louis Vuitton, Moet Hennessy, Krug, Dom Perignon, Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, Bulgari and TAG Heuer.

“I didn’t know any of these (brands while growing up in a middle-class family in India]…I still remember my origins and keep my feet on the ground.” Thakran told The Australian Financial Review. He joined LVMH in 2001, serving in various leadership roles in Asia for the French company, which has a market value of nearly $500 billion.

In 2009, Thakran founded L Capital Asia, the Asian private equity venture of LVMH. The fund invested $4 billion in 32 companies across Asia Pacific; including Charles & Keith, Gentle Monster, Bateel, YG Entertainment, Owndays Japan, Will’s Fitness China and FabIndia. In 2016, L Capital, including L Capital Asia, merged with Catterton to form L Catterton.

Thakran serves as Chairman of R.M. Williams, an Australian luxury footwear and apparel brand, and as a director of numerous other publica and private companies. Prior to joining LVMH, he held senior management positions at the Swatch Group, Nike and Tata Group, based in various global locations.

Originally from a village outside Delhi, Thakran was an only child. His mother was a teacher and father a civil servant who advised farmers. His parents, who moved to New Delhi to give Thakran a better education, scraped and saved just enough of their meagre income to send Thakran to a good school and university, accordng to the Australian Financial Review. Thakran earned his MBA from the India Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

He learned his first words of English in Grade 6 and, given his late learning of the language, finished at the bottom of the class in middle school. While in college he was a socialist, Thakran told a group of alums of IIM Bangalore in 2018, according to a blogger who was at the lunch conversation held at the Yantra restaurant in Singapore.

His student experiences, he says, shaped his view of pursuing capitalism with conscience. Participating in student politics also sharpened Thakran’s people skills. For instance, to motivate staff at Sephora, the beauty products store-chain owned by LVMH, he set targets. If a day’s target was met, the staff could close the store half-an-hour early and have a champagne party. The staff at one store ended up having 69 champagne parties in one year, which upset the company’s finance chief. But Thakran continued with the practice, the blogger reported.

Growing up in New Delhi, Thakran was deeply influenced by the bustle in the city arising from the mingling of Indians from different religious, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. He told The Star that, “The diversity in New Delhi prepares you to be anywhere in the world…the classroom is not the only educational platform. When you walk on the streets, you see things that teach you a lot more about life.”

In 2015, Thakran told CP Jobs that his long-term plan was to return to India to work on social issues. “The final part of my journey will be back there (in India) working with some of the poorer people. I never forget my humble roots,” he said.

Taking over as Executive Chairman of Wheels Up, Thakran said in a statement that as the company “continues to scale and evolve, I am looking forward to leveraging my experience leading some of the world's largest luxury brands to drive success in providing an extraordinary experience for our members while at the same time delivering on our commitments to profitable growth."

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