February 22, 2025
Top 5 fractional/charter operator FlyExclusive is streamlining its Jet Club jet card while keeping entry level at $100,000.
FlyExclusive is revamping its Jet Club jet card program.
The revised program retains the core benefits of guaranteed availability and fixed hourly rates.
It also keeps short-booking guarantees, deal days, and its current daily access fee rate structure.
Key changes include the addition of a second super-midsize category.
Premium Super-Mid features stand-up cabin Challenger 300s and 350s.
Jet Club also includes light, midsize, and standard super-midsize jets.
Members choose whichever category they want for each trip.
There are no interchange fees.
FlyExclusive is the 5th-largest U.S. fractional/charter operator.
Company executives have previously said over 98% of flights are fulfilled on-fleet.
There is now just one tier, starting with a $100,000 non-refundable payment.
You receive a 10% flight credit for every dollar over that mark.
In other words, depositing $200,000 for future flights would provide a $10,000 flight credit bonus.
Previously, there were deposit levels of $200,000 and $400,000.
The term remains 24 months or whenever funds are used.
You are allowed one supplemental deposit during the contract’s term.
When your Jet Club contract expires, unused funds can be rolled into a new agreement based on the current terms.
You can also apply unused monies towards fractional ownership.
Chief Commerical Officer Mike Guina says, “Our goal was to create the simplest, most transparent jet membership in private aviation, and we believe our latest version of the Jet Club accomplishes that.”
The new contract is just six pages long.
Previous contracts spanned as many as 17 pages.
It is the first major revamp since June 2023.
The Kinston, North Carolina-based company was founded in 2014.
However, it didn’t launch a jet card program until May 2020.
Guina adds, “We’ve refined our Jet Club to provide members with transparent pricing and unmatched flexibility featuring our unique pricing model that delivers unparalleled efficiency.”
In addition to reducing the fine print, its latest jet card locks your pricing for 24 months.
The previous was 12 months.
There are no fuel surcharges or fuel surcharge provisions.
Peak days are capped at 35 per year.
That’s better than the industry average of 44.6 peak dates.
However, they will be updated every six months in October and April instead of annually.
FlyExclusive entered the jet card market in 2020 with a share-of-market strategy.
Back then, it had 63 aircraft on its charter certificate.
According to the most recent FAA update, it has 91 tails, with XLS midsize types (45) making up nearly half the fleet.
Last year, flight hours increased 16.3%.
The 9,008 jump in flight hours put it fourth in gains on an hours flown basis behind NetJets, Flexjet, and Airshare.
Today’s changes keep it a value provider, although prices are increasing.
The program retains its daily access fee and low hourly rate.
In other words, Jet Club is particularly efficient the more you fly in a single day.
The longer the flight, generally speaking, the more significant the price advantage against other fixed-rate programs.
No daily or segment minimums exist, so Jet Club works similarly to days-based programs if you make multiple flights on the same day.
Daily access rates increase between $250 and $750, and hourly rates also increase.
There are also some tweaks.
Gone are its coast-to-coast caps.
The standard super-midsize pricing for a five-hour nonstop flight in the Continental U.S. is $46,588 one-way, including taxi time, Federal Excise Tax, and amortized monthly membership fee per Private Jet Card Comparisons QUICK COMPARE FLIGHT PRICING calculator available for paid subscribers.
The previous 4.5-hour cap pricing would have meant $42,988 for the five-hour flight under the new pricing or 38,696 under the old pricing.
It also seemingly marks an end to deep guaranteed discounts for transcontinental flights.
XO, Jet Edge, before being purchased by Vista Global, Wheels Up, Sentient, FXAir, and some other smaller players, have previously offered coast-to-coast pricing under $35,000 each way over the past five years.
In some cases, the fixed transcontinental prices were as low as $27,500 each way.
FlyExclusive’s new premium Challenger 300/350 offering is $61,960 for a five-hour nonstop within the Continental U.S.
Current guaranteed availability fixed or capped rate pricing for a nonstop five-hour flight on a super-midsize jet ranges between $46,397 and $104,000 each way, again, per QUICK COMPARE FLIGHT PRICING.
On the same basis, a two-hour light jet flight on FlyExclusive is $17,200.
That makes it a price leader for on-fleet fixed/capped rate guaranteed availability programs.
The Private Jet Card Comparisons database of fixed-rate, guaranteed-availability jet card pricing ranges from $13,717 to $24,650.
Programs that guarantee WiFi on light jets start at $16,437, although not on a national basis.
FlyExclusive’s previous Deal Days moved from a standard 10% discount to rolling discounts updated monthly for members.
Also gone are the flexible departure discounts.
Regarding extra charges, surcharges for flights to, from, and between Washington State and Oregon have been expanded to include British Columbia and Idaho.
There were no changes to its international footprint.
Its international guaranteed rate program includes customs airports across Central America and Northern South America, which is rare with jet cards.
The same is true for Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada.
However, Alaska and Hawaii remain excluded.
FlyExclusive also retains its standard callout of 96 hours non-peak.
The program allows members to book up to 24 hours before departure with guaranteed availability at a surcharge.
Surcharges are tiered and increase as you get closer to departure.
Surcharge tiers are between 72 and 96 hours, 48 and 72 hours, and 24 and 48 hours.
FlyExclusive went public via a SPAC IPO at the end of 2023.
It also moved to losses that continued for the first nine months of 2024.
Year-to-date operating loss increased from $13.9 million to $70.2 million through Q3 2024.
Executives attributed the losses to the costs of going public, growth investment, and unreliable older aircraft that impacted dispatch reliability.
Chairman and CEO Jim Segrave told analysts those older aircraft were unavailable nearly 70% of the time.
The company has been selling off the underperforming fleets and moving to newer aircraft, building via its fractional ownership program.
Overall revenues during the first three quarters of 2024 were down 1.5% to $235.9 million.
The company’s revenue increased from $99 million in 2019 to $121 million in 2020, $208.3 million in 2021, and $320 million in 2022 before leveling off at $315 million in 2023.
In the 2024 Q3 earnings call, CFO Brad Garner said, “As we head into 2025, we believe we are on a path to make continued progress on delivering positive adjusted EBITDA and, most importantly, driving increasingly positive free cash flow.”
FlyExclusive has not announced a date to report Q4 earnings yet.
Last month, it agreed to acquire Jet AI’s aviation division.
In December, the company said it had its best Thanksgiving in history.
From 2023 to 2024, FlyExclusive continued to see improvements in how you rate its service.
It followed an industrywide dip from 2021 to 2022 as providers struggled to deal with the Covid demand surge.
According to nearly 600 subscribers who responded to our most recent annual survey, 81.8% rated FlyExclusive as Excellent or Very Good among those in its Jet Club or fractional programs.
The average across all providers was 73.3%.
An additional 12.7% of its members rated it Average.
It also marked an improvement from 2023, when 71.2% rated it Excellent/Very Good, with 19.2% saying their experience was Average.
The percentage rating FlyExclusive Below Average or Poor dropped from 5.8% to 3.6% year-over-year, which aligns with the overall average across programmatic offerings.
The remaining respondents told us it was too soon to tell.
Industrywide, Excellent/Very Good ratings dropped from 77.5% in 2021 to 61.7% in 2022.
The annual survey is conducted from July through early September each year.
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