Nice to see you gave the cross country shuttle a try and are still enjoying the membership. The loss of Travel Management was a bummer for me. I was only interested in the private jets, mostly for ski trips during the winter … an opportunity that never came as that relationship terminated just as ski season started. As I told JetSmarter, there’s a fairly large and established industry that does shared flights and those existing operators allow me to plan more than 5 hours in advance …
The Travel Management crews were excellent. They treated you like a paying customer and it was a first class operation. The pilots came to chat during the flight to make sure everything was okay, offered to carry your bags when boarding and departing, and on occasion even laid out a red carpet. XO is a bit of a different experience. The XO staff sees a bunch of people who don’t know each other show up and treat you like you’re taking a free ride … I assume Delta Jets will be the same.
I was booked on AA Flt #125 JFK-LAX last Sunday and there was the JetSmarter shuttle operating. I considered it for about a half a second and then decided to stick with my first class seat. A fully loaded G-IV is basically a step above economy as far as I’m concerned with the main redeeming quality here being that it is free. If I ever saw one with only a couple passengers a few hours prior to departure and my schedule was clear, that I may consider.
I’m not sure if its greater awareness on my part, but it seems more of the charter providers are trying to fill their empty legs. FlyEasy has a couple big operators with great aircraft (Clay Lacy for one) on their software platform and I’ve seen some stuff marketed aggressively. I’d rather take a few of these per year with advanced scheduling versus the JetSmarter 5 hours advance notice gimmick.
My membership lasts until July so maybe something will happen that impresses me, but at this point I’ll most likely cancel it. Part of that is the value proposition just isn’t there without the exclusive use charters, and the other part is I don’t think this company is going to be around long. Per Centurion’s question there is no way this is financially viable. They are banking on people who buy it and don’t use it, BS ancillary fees (e.g., no shows), or thinking it’s going to generate them actual charter business … Operating the round trip on a G-IV is going to be $40,000+ (I’m assuming they received extremely favorable terms and have a deal to channel other business to the operator). But you have 26 seats per round trip. That means each seat is costing $1,600. Assume the average member is going to fly a round trip and their cost is at least $3,200 for taking one round trip flight (and it spikes if the planes going out partially full). So if I take one flight it cost them half my membership cost. And not even taking into account their overhead with all these new offices they are opening and staff they are hiring. Now if I take a second …
I realize they raised $20 MM recently, but it’d appear they are burning it in a hurry!