Despite a flow of companies seeking to digitize private jet charters, Unity Jets says the old-fashioned way still works best for customers.
Miami-based private jet charter broker Unity Jets is offering a $2,500 bonus through the end of November.
The bonus, which can be used for flight credits, is available to customers who deposit at least $100,000 in their accounts.
“We are seeing more experienced private flyers who want something beyond what’s offered by the standard jet card and membership programs with dozens of pages of rules and fine print,” says Unity Jets Founder and CEO Kevin Diemar.
Diemar, a former NetJets sales executive, started the company in 2011.
At the same time, he says he is not concerned about the many platforms, brokers, and hybrids promoting instant booking or direct-to-operator quoting designed to bypass brokers.
Diemar reels off a list of scenarios where he says traditional brokers such as Unity Jets excel.
Just yesterday, at 1 am on Sunday, his team received an email canceling a 2 pm departure from Aspen to Los Cabos, citing a mechanical.
Without moving the departure time, Unity Jets was able to find a replacement aircraft for the customer from another operator.
The replacement cost was $7,000 more than the original price.
Because of its ongoing business with the operator that canceled, Unity Jets was able to negotiate future credits that it could use.
In this case, the client received the replacement flight at their original cost.
“If the customer had booked with the operator, it would have been, ‘I’m sorry. Here’s your money back. It’s up to you to figure it out,'” Diemar says.
The customer would then have had to find another operator on short notice, pay whatever the new quote was, and wire the money, which is no easy task on the weekend.
The reason for the cancelation also underscores how the known unknowns of private jet charters often put consumers in a tough spot.
On this trip, there was a mechanical.
However, it was not with the airplane Unity Jets had chartered.
It was with an aircraft managed by that same operator for another aircraft owner, and that owner wanted to fly.
The management company’s biggest concern was keeping the owner of the other aircraft it manages happy.
“Customers, and even some brokers, don’t know the right questions to ask,” Diemar says.
Another example is when sourcing aircraft; Unity Jets always finds out if the aircraft has been booked for flights before or after its customer’s trip.
“If the previous trip was supposed to finish at 11 pm the night before, and our client wanted to leave at 7 am, we would find another operator. There’s just too much risk that if that other trip is delayed, it will impact our trip,” Diemar says.
The company also enquires with the operator whether the aircraft is scheduled for maintenance between booking and flight.
“That’s a red flag,” Diemar says.
MROs are often delayed when returning aircraft to service, sometimes because of parts on order or a backlog of work.
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Diemar says that around 50% of ad hoc charter customers want to change their departure time, date, or routing after booking.
“You have a client who is flying from Atlanta to Aspen, and then they decide they want to pick up their daughter who goes to school in Austin. Or, they book a trip on the wrong day and don’t realize it until a week later,” Diemar says.
Diemar says Unity Jets knows which customers are prone to change.
“You can only know that if you have a relationship and a personal rapport with your customers. A booking app doesn’t know that,” he says.
For those trips, his sourcing team looks for operators it knows are more flexible.
“We have clients who almost always want to leave later than the time originally booked. We use operators we know are more flexible,” Diemar says.
Diemar says the changes and even cancelations are typically not permitted under the contract in these cases.
However, Unity Jets’ ongoing flow of bookings to its regular operators means they work to accommodate those changes.
“It’s a partnership that a consumer or a platform just spamming quote requests to hundreds of operators won’t have,” he says.
In terms of offering a fixed-rate jet card program, Diemar says some customers use both.
He believes his dynamic pricing membership best serves customers who want personalized attention.
He says virtually all new customers come via referrals.
“The biggest reason we lose customers is they are flying so much, they buy a jet,” Diemar says.
However, he adds, “Even when you own a jet, it has downtime for maintenance. Or you need a different aircraft type, so they still call us.”
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