T-15.01

Happy to stand corrected but the preamble says the charter terms apply to public charters or private ones. The DOT states public charters are where an operator buys the flight and sells seats separately. I think, and am possibly wrong, but think Jetsmarter defers liability to say a shuttle is operated by eg Jet Edge and/or Preister, but they're just the agent who helps you buy your seat.

In the case of an empty again, they push the liability of DOT regs to the DOT entitled operator and again bill cancelation fees as the agent, not the operator.

I get to that same website when clicking on a shuttle or deal from the legal terms perspective. So I'm not sure I follow you saying it's not referenced at all for their jet deals or shuttles.

As I said I'm happy to be corrected and apologize for where I'm missing it.

T-15.01

Thanks, I got it, now! Just like the word "pay" that was alluded to and eluded you, thank goodness we are among equals here. Imperfect but all working to improve!

Sykes

In the US, 14 CFR Part 135 prohibits charter operators from selling flights by the seat because all flights must be on-demand. Carriers that sell scheduled flights by the seat must be certified under (generally, with a few exceptions) Part 121 (think: United, Amerrican, etc).

The only relevant (to this discussion) exception to this rule is public charters. A Part 380 public charter operator may purchase a charter flight from a Part 135 operator and sell individual seats to the general public. In that situation, both the Part 135 operator and the Part 380 public charter operator must be disclosed to the consumer, and they can't be the same company.

Ergo, regardless of what any contracts say:
- If JetSmarter is selling flights within the US, and
- If JetSmarter is selling flights by the seat, and
- If JetSmarter is not disclosing that the public charter operator is someone other than themselves, and
- If JetSmarter is not a Part 121 airline operating flights themselves
THEN they're a Part 380 public charter operator and are consequently subject to the regulations.

Regardless, I actually asked about this when I first joined and my rep told me that JetShuttles and JetDeals are Part 380 public charters and that JetSmarter is the public charter operator. So I'm pretty confident in this.

JetSmarter does act solely as an agent in whole aircraft charters, and there may be a loophole in the new shared charters (and, less likely, member-initiated shuttles) where a member is really purchasing the charter so they may argue they're not technically public charters, but that's definitely not the case with most of what we fly with JetSmarter.

SFO777

It's been a while since I booked a Jet Deal, indeed back nearly 18 months ago to the days when we got the entire plane. Since then we've soured on JS with Mrs. SFO777 correctly opining "if we have to share the plane, then it's not private is it?"

With my 90 day membership, I get 2 free seats. Can I buy out the rest of the plane at the Extra Seat price with having to worry about filling the other 5 or 6 seats and being charged a no show fee? Used to be as long as the member or spouse showed up, JS didn't care. Is this still the case?

millions

Yep. I always take the full allotment.

SFO777

Thanks millions. ^

GiselePJ

Posted SharedCharter

dval44

Saw this too! Yikes, $3,723 for one seat on what is essentially an empty leg. Empty on that route for same plane would be something like $800-1,200 I imagine for an ACCESS memeber and $0 for everyone else. So is the marginal $2k-3.7k worth it for a confirmed flight?

On the creation side, I'm curious how they price and reimburse

dordal

It's basically the price divided by the number of seats. FLL-APC is about $28K one way for an 8 seat plane. $3723 * 8 = $29,784. Essentially the charter customer pays the full cost of the charter in cash, just like with any other broker. The new feature here is that JS then tries to resell the seats, and if they are successful the original customer get reimbursed in flight credit, usable for any other flights.

It could be pretty revolutionary if they get the volume of flights. I'm not sure how effective it will be in its present incarnation though, because a) only other JS members can buy seats, and there's only 10K members; and b) You can only use $3K in flight credit at a time. So if the FLL-APC guy gets his $3727 * 6 = $22,338 in credit, he'll need to use that over 8 subsequent flights, which might be a lot to ask.

Nicoolio

Can you post the terms about using the flight credits? I've been looking but haven't seen it - thanks, Niccolo

dval44

Thanks for the explanation. I don't think this will work because of the outsized cost for the "joiners" compared to all other flight offerings. A shuttle from FLL to LAX is free (or I guess a few hundred now), while a "shared charter" is $3.7k. So for the "joiner" who didn't pick airport, time, date, etc. I imagine it will only rarely be worth the extreme cost difference.

PbodyPhoto

I can only see the shared charter making any sense if people book something that coincides with a major event. I can see people dropping $2k for a seat on a non stop jet from say New York to the Kentucky Derby but I just can't see it working for random city pairs on random dates.

speaking of which didn't they once offer jetshuttles to places like that for big events?

millions

Yep, totally agree. As I said earlier, this is a nice feature to have available, but won't move the needle much.

I understand JS is finally trying to control costs (relatedly, yes to those previous jetshuttles), so doesn't want to subsidize these, but they might want to consider giving creators the option of doing so. That is, rather than charging members the "full price" of the other seats, the creator should be able to set the price, on the theory that a little return credit is better than nothing.

sfo2bos

How would this work from an accounting perspective. If a user expends a credit on a shuttle that credit is extinguished and comes on balance sheet.

However, if these credits are being used on shared charters solely, or in most cases, this liability could balloon as you are just passing from one member to the next.

For sake of simplicity we assume all seats are the same cost.

For a single charter with eight seats, say the initiating member takes two and sells six. JS takes cash equal to fourteen seats (great margin) but creates carried liability (albeit with heavy usage restrictions for client) of six seats.

Original initiator uses his received credits (six seats) to buy four seats on another member initiated charter. JS takes in cash for charter from second initiator, so costs are covered, but the credits are just transferred so initiator one has two credits left, and initiator two has four to further use.

The $3k cap is necessary so the structure holds long term.

Cash comes in up front (good for JS) but without constant growth or members using a significant amount of credits on flights that don't simply trade credits among members, the scheme eventually becomes a charter broker operation with a layers of added logistics.

millions

I don't understand why liability would balloon. The credits are still not going out in amounts greater than the cash going in; they don't multiply. Some nonzero number of credits will be unused because of membership termination, and that's JS's profit (in addition to whatever small profit it extracts in the margin between the price paid to the operator and sale to "creator"). It may not be much, but it's better than almost every other aspect of its business.

All the credit use cap accomplishes is providing JS with more operating cash (and a greater pool of potential unused credits), which is not in and of itself reassuring to a holder of those credits.