CrewPlanet

The Problem

Airline crew keep a schedule nobody else keeps. You land somewhere for eighteen hours, you don't know the city, and the people who do know it are colleagues you'll probably never be rostered with again. The knowledge exists. Which airport lounge is worth the walk, which hotel honours crew rates, who else is in town tonight. Authenticity is the product.

What It Does

You sign in, then verify that you actually work for an airline using your company email address. From there: check in at your layover destination and see which crew are nearby or checked in at the same place. Read and post tips on food, transport, lounges and wellness for airports and cities. Browse crew-rate deals. Organise meetups with timezone-correct scheduling and export them to your own calendar. Message people directly, connect across airlines and bases, and read cached tips and deals when there's no signal at all. It's free, with no paid tier.

The hard part

A closed network is only worth joining if the wall holds. There is no public register of who works for which airline, so the only credential available is a work email address, and treating that as proof is harder than it looks. Airline names overlap heavily. A check that is even slightly generous hands one carrier's badge to several others, and once a handful of those are inside, the premise is gone.

So the check is strict. The cost of strictness is that the list of accepted carriers has to change without waiting on an app release, and that tension shaped most of the build. Anything a user could tamper with is settled on the server rather than the phone: verification, limits, moderation.

It's a single app on iOS and Android, and it has to open and stay useful with no signal at all, which is the normal condition on a layover.

Where It Stands

The app ran as a website alongside the phone apps for a year. That went in May 2026, and the paid consumer tier a month after it, which is how a free crew network ended up aiming at airlines and businesses rather than at individual crew.

Shipped, and live on both the App Store and Google Play at version 3.6.0. Current work is invite-only business accounts and a bilingual EN/NL marketing site. The wall that makes the network worth joining is also what makes distribution deliberate: a closed network cannot grow by accident, so every route in has to be built on purpose.