Who Ya Gonna Call? iJET!
Start-Up Survives With Product for These Times: Intelligence for Travelers
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By Jeremy Breningstall
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, April 4, 2002; Page AA14



The Baku-Balakan highway in northwestern Azerbaijan is closed due to civil unrest. Heavy fog is looming over India. A Hamas anniversary is coming up.

You're an international traveler heading to Indonesia on business or Russia on vacation. You're about to venture into a post-Sept. 11 world where danger seems to lurk beyond every airport metal detector and customs checkpoint. You want information more current than what's in a travel guide, more comprehensive than what's on CNN, more practical than what you get from the State Department.

Enter iJET, an Annapolis start-up that provides more than 350,000 corporate employees and 21,000 travel agents with access to detailed travel intelligence on 156 countries.

The company's $2 million operations center on Bestgate Road is filled with ex-spies -- many of whom look the part. Most of iJET's 58 employees have some sort of experience with U.S., Russian, South African, Israeli or British intelligence on their résumés.

With the help of computerized filters and knowledge of 17 languages, iJET staffers absorb files from 5,000 sources a day, monitoring conditions in 10 areas of intelligence, including security, health, transportation and environment. The information gets as particular as traffic fine procedures, handshaking customs and the dial numbers for local English-language radio stations.

"The major networks here don't cover London Underground strikes," said Richard Lurie, who spent 24 years working for the National Security Agency before signing on as iJET's vice president of intelligence operations. "There have been a dozen since April. They put people above ground and cause gridlock in the city."

iJET doesn't stop with gathering information. When troublesome or threatening situations develop, iJET has the capacity to send real-time intelligence alerts to travelers, via e-mail, phone, fax or pager. They tell clients not only what is happening but also what they should do about it.

"We don't play that CNN role of all hell's breaking loose, there's mayhem," said senior managing editor John Briley, a former travel writer who makes sure that iJET's information is easy to read and puts the most important news at the top. "We say, 'These streets are closed; here's where you need to go.' "

Tina Gunter, a travel agent with Carlson Wagonlit Travel in Arnold, has found iJET's service incredibly useful in helping her to advise her clients.

"It's kind of a one-stop shop for me," she said.

iJET's information ranges from the general (some countries do not appreciate couples kissing in public) to the specific (police in Jamaica are becoming more aggressive about prosecuting marijuana offenders; be wary of counterfeit sports tickets in Croatia). iJET's database also has general travel information including weather forecasts, exchange rates, immunizations and practical advice about what to do in a kidnapping situation.

The company predicts it will take in $5 million to $6 million in revenue this year and expects that number to roughly double in 2003. Yet plenty of people in the travel industry harbored doubts about iJET's viability -- not because they thought its services weren't needed, but because its launch coincided with the collapse of the high-tech economy.

"Despite its best efforts, it had been tagged as a start-up dot-com at a time when the investment community was avoiding anything with dot-com in its name, no matter how useful, innovative or relevant," said Christopher Elliott, who runs a Florida-based travel Web site, www.elliott.org.

But that was before Sept. 11. For iJET, everything changed the morning two planes plowed into the World Trade Center, one slammed into the Pentagon and a fourth crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

'What's Going On . . . What to Do About It'


At 9 on that sun-drenched September morning, iJET staffers were in the middle of their daily intelligence briefing inside the company's "op center," a 5,000-square-foot version of a surveillance van, located in a commercial strip across from the Annapolis Mall.

"The TV on the big screen was tuned to the weather because we were tracking a big storm," Lurie recalls. A far different storm was about to hit.

When the first plane struck the World Trade Center, people at iJET were amazed, Lurie said. "Like much of the country, we thought it was a freak accident until we saw the second plane hit the second tower."

Carl Provencher, director of security intelligence, was out of the office at the time but immediately phoned to say he was coming in. David Harmann, director of watch operations, and Bruce McIndoe, now chief executive, brought in wide-band radios so staff could monitor worldwide radio broadcasts.

Everyone tried to stay focused, though it wasn't easy.

"Many of the staff had friends in the World Trade Center," Lurie said. "Our chairman, John Power, had been at the WTC just the day before. The former military people at iJET knew people at the Pentagon. So it was hard for us not to be emotionally impacted at some level. One employee had a very close friend on a high-level floor in one of the towers."

But there was no time to dwell on who might be lost inside either building. For a company that not only explains what's going on but also what to do about it, the work was just beginning. iJET went into overdrive, sending out 22 alerts in a single day to its travelers, many of them stranded and stunned.

"Travelers outside the U.S. who have not registered with the U.S. Embassy in their destination should do so -- by phone, fax or e-mail -- as soon as possible," read one.

"Avoid all travel to or around U.S. embassies as they are likely targets of further terrorist attacks," read another. "In the event that U.S. embassies are closed, travelers should contact the Swiss, United Kingdom or Canadian embassies."

"Persons in major cities outside the U.S. should secure lodging as quickly as possible," a third alert urged. "With the cancellation of all international flights to the U.S., hotel accommodations in some non-U.S. cities may be difficult to obtain."

Ten iJET "reservists" came into the office to help out with the workload. As the day wore on, Lurie ordered 20 pizzas because no one had thought to eat.

The company decided to make its Web site free for a month, recognizing that the crisis was also an opportunity. Page views shot up from 16,000 to 170,000 a day. And no wonder. When air travel resumed, the rules had suddenly changed.

Some airlines were now requiring passports for travel into Mexico; others were asking passengers to arrive four hours before every departure. Plastic knives were suddenly verboten at many airports, where national guardsmen toting M-1s patrolled the terminals.

iJET followed these changes, sometimes finding out about them through phoned-in tips. "I found myself depending on them," said Gunter, the Arnold travel agent.

Annapolis: Desired Proximity


iJET was the brainchild of Peter Savage and Fran Lessans, co-owners of Passport Health, and Paul Stiles, an ex-Navy cryptologist. In 1998, the three men got to talking at a travel health conference in Montreal and decided to launch a travel Web site together.

Savage, Lessans and another partner, William Shoff, put up $150,000 -- enough to pay Stiles to quit his day job and spend a year creating iJET's infrastructure.

Stiles rented an office in an old leaky building at the closed David Taylor Research Center, across the Severn River from the U.S. Naval Academy. As 1999 came to an end, the company got its name and its first employee beyond Stiles. Another 15 months passed before iJET began offering its services to customers, in March 2001.

The company was headquartered in Annapolis because the city, with its close proximity to Fort Meade, NSA and downtown Washington, was already home to many in the intelligence community, said McIndoe, who became iJET's chief operating officer in 1999.

When it came time to start raising capital, Lessans said, "We all knew people, and we made phone calls."

About $17 million in venture capital has been raised to keep the company going, though investor enthusiasm for dot-coms has largely disappeared. iJET's first large capital infusion -- $9 million -- arrived when the company was down to its last $5,000.

At one point, iJET employed 101 people. Just over half remain. And the company has been through some personnel shake-ups, including the decision to install McIndoe as chief executive in January.

Even the company's business plan has changed since its launch. Originally, iJET was aimed at the travel industry. But that plan went out the window after Sept. 11, when travel business faced a steep decline.

To compensate, iJET has increased its focus on corporate and insurance clients. At the beginning of the fourth quarter last year, iJET had six corporate clients; by the end of the same quarter, there were 20. Today, through corporate intranet servers, close to a quarter of a million employees from 22 major corporations have access to iJET's travel bulletins.

iJET recently announced it would be integrated into GetThere, a corporate booking system used by 800 companies. On an average day, iJET might be monitoring information for close to 2,000 travelers, a number that is rapidly rising. Each traveler is profiled, and information is sent to them based on their profiles.

Through global reservation systems such as Amadeus and Worldspan, iJET's information is also available to 21,000 travel agents. Individual travelers, who represent only a minimal portion of iJET's business, also have the option of commissioning iJET services at a cost of $25 a trip.

"The average person who goes to Russia goes once in their life," Lurie said. "We want to help them maximize their experience."

Ultimately, iJET's goal is to go public, which could happen as soon as next year. Savage said his initial $50,000 investment is only worth about $25,000 in stock now. But he remains bullish about the company's growth prospects, especially in a post-Sept. 11 world.

"Nobody can go where they are without a major investment," he said. "They're ahead of the curve."


© 2002 The Washington Post Company