Originally Posted by
dordal
Many of those aren't really empty legs; they're operators searching for business. The rest are usually by operators that haven't figured out yet that they can't monetize empty legs at 80% of the cost of a charter.
What dval44 is talking about is a program either like JetSuite (used to?) have, where you could pay $500 for a next-day empty leg, or like like JS or DPJ has, where you pay a fixed membership fee (e.g. $5K to $6K) and you get 'all you can eat' empty legs. I too would pay for that -- if somebody made a service that got a few operators together and charged either $500 a flight or $5K-$6K for a year, I'd join in a heartbeat.
Dordal nails it.
Wide variety right now in the empty space. Some, like JetEdge are almost full charter cost, whereas $0 per flight with DPJ Sky Access. JetLinx charges members $1k-2k per hour for empties, which is somewhere in the middle.
Sounds petty but the the Jetsmarter app is pretty awesome for empties - logging on and checking DPJ website is horrible.
I was ready to pull the trigger on wheels up 8760 membership mostly for the free Inspirato membership and a couple empties per year, but found that they pulled the program.
Somewhere around 2016 was the golden age of JS empty legs where they had Jet Linx, DPJ, XOjet, and even heavies for a week (JetEdge).
Assume we could recreate this model of soemone wants to go in with me on building a solid empties-only program.