Flying private jets has become a necessity in the 21st century for elite business executives, celebrities, big corporate houses, and VIPs. It is no more only a status symbol but also turns out to be economical while sharing private jet, also time-saving and comparatively much effortless travel while flying on commercial jets. This was when the fractional ownership of a private jet came in the picture. But it is proved now that ‘fractional ownership’ programs are fast declining as it becomes inefficient and not worth the investment. Simultaneously, plane sharing has also become inevitable as it makes private planes increasingly affordable for business travellers.
Jet cards have become the latest status symbol in the private jet flying. It is a straightforward concept. It is nothing but a prepaid debit card bought from a private jet fleet owner and has 25-hour increments or a predefined set of hours typically. The jet card provides access to private planes for a flat fee. Clients possessing jet card programs can book a flight on the company jet anytime, anywhere, with concise notice. And as they have already paid, money transferring, paperwork completion for booking and other formalities are eliminated, saving time and overheads.
It can be said it’s like a Zipcar, and you don’t have to have even partial ownership of the plane to use it. This is very handy, especially for frequent business flyers, who need to fly multi destinations frequently. You won’t even fly the same plane any time in life again, yet with the Jet card, you have the facility at your disposal as and when needed. It also eliminates the overheads such as staff salary and other headaches related to partial or full ownership of a plane. Even nowadays private aviation people have gone ahead and started saying “Jet cards are like Spotify”, this shows the amount of flexibility they intend to indicate.
The jet card is not a new concept, but changing the frequent flyers’ changing time and requirements is widely accepted very fast and partial ownership is phasing out rapidly. Bombardier realizing this trend in the year 2013 and sold off Flexjet. Now Flexjet also offers a card system, called Flexjet 25. The current leader in this business is Marquis Jet, which Kenny Dichter founded.