Editor’s note:  Forbes.com contributor Doug Gollan has undertaken an analysis of jet card companies for his new business providing a paid analysis of jet card programs.

The first installment compared 18 jet card companies and programs.
The second installment compared private jet cards to charter.
The third installment is a who’s who in private jet card & prepaid charter.

The fourth installment compares private jet card guaranteed availability, charges, peak days and more:

If you’ve been following along in my series of postings about jet cards and prepaid private aviation charter programs, you’ll know that the results of my research cover over 80 programs. If I ever want to get a masters degree, you can guess what subject my dissertation will be about. In the meantime, it’s the source for most of the information I am providing in these articles.

That said, there are no rules and regulations of what delineates a jet card from pre-paid block charter. While a number of providers say guaranteed availability at your contracted price is required to have a “true” jet card, the fact is some companies market jet card-like products (They give you a nice plastic card with your name and their logo on it) without it having the guarantee on price and availability together. There are also sellers of prepaid private jet travel I’ve found (VistaJet, as an example) that don’t call their product a jet card, yet do guarantee availability at a contracted price.

Over 80 jet card and charter programs are included in Doug Gollan’s jet card comparison and jet charter research for Forbes.com. (Image by FlightList PRO)

It’s an important consideration because one reason to fly privately is the convenience of traveling when you want. During holiday periods or just busy days of the week such as Monday mornings or Friday afternoons, guaranteed availability does just that. It also means that the provider may have to go outside its own fleet if it has one, or pay the operator more than you are paying on an hourly basis to secure a plane for you. In other words, it might lose money on that trip, or in other cases, it has already laid out money with an operator to have access to planes when it thinks you will want to travel.

Of the research I did, Air Partner, Airstream Jets, Delta Private Jets, Flexjet, Jet Linx, JetSet Group, Magellan Jets, NetJets’ Marquis Jet card, Nicholas Air, Prive Jets, Sentient Jet, Star Jets International, VistaJet, Wheels Up, Wholesale Jet Club and XOJET each provide guaranteed availability, although there are exceptions during peak periods, which is discussed a bit further on in this column.

“Those Who Know Use FlightList PRO.”
80% of those using FlightList PRO have arranged charters for more than 10 years, and a full 1/4 – for more than 20 years.  Just $90/month for up to 3 users, 30-day free trials are currently available. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with companies that don’t have guaranteed access. They may have other attributes that are important to you, such as lower prices, or in the case of JetSuite, the lowest Daily Minimum I found in terms of flight hours, which they charge for just 48 minutes per day. Other providers have minimums of between 1-2.8 hours of flight time per day. It means if you take a single 45-minute flight on a specific day, with JetSuite you will be charged for 48 minutes of your hourly rate while on another provider it could be 60, 90 or even 168 minutes even though your flight was 45 minutes. If you do a lot of short hops where you don’t have a second flight in the same day, you definitely want to ask about the Daily Minimum.

Making it a bit more complicated, Daily Minimums also vary by size of aircraft, with larger planes typically having higher daily minimums. This means if your short haul flying is with a group of 10 people, you are going to need to look at programs that offer larger jets (for example, JetSuite’s Citation CJ3 only seats 7).

Another place you will find extra charges is taxi time, so the more flights you make, the more taxi time you will pay. The standard seems to be six minutes for departures and six minutes for arrival, meaning for each flight you take you will be paying for 12 minutes of taxi time. If your hourly rate is $6,000, you will pay $720 for each flight in taxi time. Yet again, this isn’t standard: Airstream Jets, Clay Lacy, JetSet Group and Wholesale Jet Club each say they don’t charge for taxi time. Several companies I contacted wouldn’t provide data about taxi time charges and Jet Linx only charges six minutes per segment, so if you had an hourly rate of $6,000 with Jet Linx, you would only pay $360 per flight in taxi time.

Lead time in making reservations is another area to consider and again there are considerable variances. For example, Clay Lacy, JetSuite and PrivateFly don’t have a lead time requirement, but then again, none guarantee availability.

Lead time for reservations with other providers varies from six hours with JetSet Group and Wholesale Jet Club (6 hours); Magellan Jets and Prive Jets (8 hours); Delta Private Jets, NetJets’ Marquis Jet Card, Nicholas Air, Private Jet Services (PJS) Group and Sentient (10 hours); and XOJET (12 hours) as the companies I found that offer guaranteed reservations less than 24 hours before you want to fly. During peak periods expect to make your reservations anywhere from 24 hours to 7 days before you want to travel.

What is a peak period or peak day? Well, think holidays, however, for those companies that offer guaranteed availability it ranges from eight to 58 days out of the year. Hourly rates for flying on peak days are subject to increases, from no increase to as high as 40%. So again, if you plan to fly at specific busy times, you will want to study what each provider lists as peak days, which sometimes vary by program within a provider. In other words, it is a really good idea that on a piece of paper you write out the trips you expect to be taking during the next 12 to 24 months.

I was really surprised when I read a survey by Business Jet Traveler that only 3% of jet card buyers use a consultant. One consultant, I talked to says he charges $3,000 to help with jet card purchases and $5,000 to assist with fractional buyers. If I was a serious buyer, to me, it seems like a good investment. Unless you have an in-house counsel, you’re probably going to have your $600 per hour lawyer spend several hours reviewing contracts anyway.

By the way, the typical way people select a jet card is a recommendation of a friend, a previous experience with the company or doing some Google research, which turns up mainly paid ads. I was speaking with one executive of a jet card provider, and his theory is that there is so much to compare and so many differences, it’s overwhelming. The rich person who is plunking down $250,000 more or less assumes or hopes that the company will be accommodating since they want to retain their business with renewals. It’s also a risk, and a provider that works well for a friend or colleague, might not be the best for you.

From Forbes.com article by Doug Gollan

The FlightList PRO multi-search platform which includes all 16,631 charter aircraft and 3,419 charter operators worldwide.  FlightList PRO is used by the most successful and experienced brokers and travel professionals in the industry; 80% of those using FlightList PRO have been arranging charters more than 10 years, and a full 1/4 – more than 20 years.  Currently 30-day free trials are available.

Air Charter Alerts by FlightList PRO, are the latest announcements in the private air charter industry about operators, brokers and charter aircraft, and geared towards active participants in the industry.

Editor’s note:  Forbes.com contributor Doug Gollan has undertaken an analysis of jet card companies for his new business providing a paid analysis of jet card programs.

The first installment compared 18 jet card companies and programs.
The second installment compared private jet cards to charter.

The third installment is a Who’s Who in private jet cards, prepaid jet charter and private jet memberships:

When you are buying a private jet card and with most prepaid programs, you are wiring the money from your bank account to theirs. With transactions often ranging from $100,000 to $500,000, it makes sense to know whom you are dealing with.

From my research, I originally found 18 different companies that offer jet cards or prepaid programs, but since publishing the first article in this series, have identified six more, including Singapore-based Zetta Jet, New York-based JetSet Group and Wholesale JetClub, Boca Raton, Florida-based Airstream Jets, GrandView Aviation from Maryland and Colorado-based StraightLine Private Air, started by a founder of Exclusive Resorts. (Note: After publishing this article, I heard from a seventh company, Silverhawk Aviation which recently introduced a Jet Card for customers living within 175 miles of Lincoln, which includes Omaha, Kansas City, Des Moines, Sioux City, Sioux Falls.). In Part 2, I took a look at whether or not it even makes sense to buy jet cards and prepaid block charter programs versus just buying as you go via on-demand charter with some interesting perspectives.

“Those Who Know Use FlightList PRO.”
80% of those using FlightList PRO have arranged charters for more than 10 years, and a full 1/4 – more than 20 years.  Just $90/month, 30-day free trials are currently available. 

In terms of the companies that you will be doing business with if you buy a jet card or prepaid program, they are about as diverse as you can imagine, and when you included related entities, span from under 10 employees to over 300,000.

Air Partner, a U.K.-based company with its U.S. headquarters in Ft. Lauderdale is the oldest, with its roots in aviation dating back to 1961. The famous pilot and aviation entrepreneur Clay Lacy (he flew a DC-8 with “The Human Fly” standing on its roof) started his namesake group in 1968. Among the most recent entrants are Marquis Jet Partners founder Kenny Dichter, who after selling it to NetJets then launched WheelsUp in 2013, Singapore-based Zetta Jet which started flying in August 2015 and Blue Star Jets (famous for taking its name from the movie Wall Street) co-founder Ricky Sitomer, who started Star Jets International last year.

Some companies are publicly owned, or divisions of publicly traded companies, including Air Partner which is directly traded in the UK, Delta Private Jets (a subsidiary of Delta Air Lines), and NetJets (which owns and sells the Marquis Jet card and is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway). Directional Aviation, which traces its history to 1981, owns two jet card players, Flexjet and Sentient. Its chairman Kenn Ricci started a small aircraft management company and has turned Directional into a multibillion-dollar enterprise which made news in 2015 when it placed an order for what potentially could be the next supersonic passenger jet. Earlier this year he won the Lifetime Aviation Entrepreneur Award. Previous winners included the founders of FedEx (Fred Smith), Southwest Airlines (Herb Kelleher) and Virgin Atlantic Airways (Sir Richard Branson).

Other bosses of note include Thomas Flohr, the founder of VistaJet who had the foresight to see the market from a global point of view, and Private Jets Services (PJS) Group founder and CEO Greg Raiff, who started the company with a focus on charters for sports team, live entertainment and political campaign charters before getting into the jet card segment. In addition to Lacy, David Sneed (Delta Private Jets) is a current commercial airline pilot for Delta. In his case, he was furloughed leading him to find a place in management although he now active again. PrivateFly founder and CEO Adam Twidell is a former Royal Air Force pilot and still flies private jets. He is married to his CMO, an ex Conde Nast executive, making them the only husband-and-wife team I came across. Nicholas Air founder Nicholas Correnti accumulated over 1,000 flight hours by the time he turned 16. JetSuite founder and CEO Alex Wilcox was a career commercial aviation executive working under two legends of that segment, Branson at Virgin Atlantic Airways and David Neeleman, who founded JetBlue and is an investor and on the board of JetSuite.

The size of the companies varies dramatically. Delta Air Lines employs 80,000 people, with Delta Private Jets making up 450. NetJets has about 6,000 employees (parent Berkshire Hathaway has 367,000), Flexjet 1,300 and VistaJet 800. At least a half dozen of the companies surveyed employ under 100 people, however, part of the variance in size is that some companies operate the planes you fly on while others use a charter broker model and go into the market to source planes for your flight. In other words, they don’t need the infrastructure to operate planes.

One of the main drivers in choosing the right company and card for you is where you want to fly. Clay Lacy, Delta Private Jets, Flexjet, JetSet Group, JetSuite, Nicholas Air, PriveJets, Sentient Jet, Solairus, Wheels Up, Wholesale Jet Club and XOJET will fly you to over 5,000 airports, but you will be mainly restricted to the continental U.S. and Canada, in some cases including the Caribbean and Mexico as part of their service footprints. Air Partner and NetJets also offer you service in Europe. Jet Linx, Magellan Jets, PJS Private Jet Service Group, Star Jets and VistaJet have global programs. Of course, some programs can arrange charter pricing for you when you go outside their service area, although you will end up paying different rates and may be subject to one-way surcharges and other extra fees.

In total, I found over 60 different variances in private jet card and prepaid private jet programs from they ways you get charged for taxi time to WiFi access, policies on flying your pets or unaccompanied children and perks such as luxury partnerships and access to big sporting events such as the Super Bowl or Kentucky Derby.

I’ll be detailing the differences in subsequent articles, however, if you want to jump ahead you can find all the information from over 80 programs in spreadsheet format at PrivateJetCardComparisons.com.

From Forbes.com article by Doug Gollan

The FlightList PRO multi-search platform which includes all 16,631 charter aircraft and 3,419 charter operators worldwide.  FlightList PRO is used by the most successful and experienced brokers and travel professionals in the industry; 80% of those using FlightList PRO have been arranging charters more than 10 years, and a full 1/4 – more than 20 years.  Currently 30-day free trials are available.

Air Charter Alerts by FlightList PRO, are the latest announcements in the private air charter industry about operators, brokers and charter aircraft, and geared towards active participants in the industry.