At first you had to be an heir to share. In 1986, Goldman Sachs executive Richard Santulli took an algorithmic approach to create fractional jet ownership. His company, NetJets, expanded the private-jet market from the obscenely rich to the merely filthy rich by dropping the price of ownership from $20 million-ish to less than $2 million. Fifteen years later, Kenny Dichter doubled the market size again by selling a Starbucks-like Marquis card that allowed the garden-variety rich to spend a mere $160,000 or so to purchase a set number of private-jet hours.
Now Dichter and other private-jet-biz veterans are lowering the altitude even further by bringing more passengers into the system. They're taking different approaches, but the target is the same: closing the gap between the cost of flying private and first-class commercial fares.
None of these outfits can legally sell single seats to the general public on their jets. That's for commercial airlines. Instead, they scour the market for empty charter legs or assemble clients looking to go from, say, Boston to Aspen, Colo., and then troll for a discount charter. Technology makes the market efficient. "We have perfected the formula for selling seats on private jets," says Dean Rotchin, CEO of BlackJet, which allows members to book flights from the New York City area to Florida ($1,831 one way), San Francisco ($3,766) and Los Angeles as though they were hailing cabs. Which makes sense, given that BlackJet is backed by some of the investors who started Uber, the taxi-finding app.
All sharing services, from Zipcar to Rent the Runway, work on the same principle. There are oodles of idle capacity available and untapped customers willing to use it. What had been missing was a way to predict the demand and price it. So algorithms as much as entrepreneurship are driving startups such as:
• JumpSeat, a peer-to-peer jet-sharing exchange that matches owners ("flyers") with like-minded and moneyed members ("buyers"). A flyer posts an available leg on, say, a seven-seat jet from Bedford, Mass., to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Nov. 12 for $12,000. If enough members request the trip to make it efficient (and the flyer approves the passenger list, sniff sniff), JumpSeat charters the jet and members split the cost. The fares amount to 50% to 100% over those of first class. "It works very well for leisure travel, not business," says CEO Justin Sullivan. "Someone who can adjust his schedule takes advantage of distressed inventory, if you will."
• Jumpjet, which sells $1,500-to-$8,000 monthly subscriptions that allow 10 annual round-trips. (The price determines how far you can go.) It differs from JumpSeat in that it lets passengers book flights in advance and then guarantees the flight. Subscribers can request an a.m. or p.m. departure, but Jumpjet sets the exact time. "We don't charter until I know who's flying where," says founder and CEO Will Ashcroft. "Then I book the physical aircraft." That too eliminates flyers on deadlines, but Ashcroft says there are plenty of ticked-off well-off leisure flyers. "Our absolute focus is those who are fed up with dealing with the airlines and have nowhere else to turn," he says.