The answer is the length of your flights matters…a lot, particularly if you take a lot of shorter flights where the actual flight time is under an hour.
Let’s assume you plan to use you private jet card to fly a lot of short legs, say between the Los Angeles basin and San Diego or maybe within the state of Florida, from Orlando to Miami or Ft. Lauderdale.
If you were going to fly twice a week roundtrip on 30-minute hops for the next 12 weeks, you might think you will be taking 24 hours of flight time (2 flights x 30 minutes x 2 per week x 12 weeks). In fact some programs have a minimum of 60 minutes per segment or two hours flying per day. Additionally you will need to add in taxi time which will be charged anywhere from 6-to-12 minutes per flight.
In other words, if you don’t read the fine print, those 48 flights which you thought would be 24 hours of jet card time could turn into over 57 charged hours! If your hourly rate is $5,000, that’s the difference between $120,000 and $285,000 if you don’t pay attention to the details.
Minimum hours charged per flight or per day are two good examples of why comparing jet cards and prepaid jet charter programs means more than looking at aircraft types and hourly rates. The easiest way to do some due diligence is to check out the Private Jet Card Comparisons exclusive comparison spreadsheets tracking over 75 programs from 18 different companies, including 62 points of differentiation. You can access the spreadsheets by clicking here.
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