Jet Card Costs – What you need to know before you buy

How much will my private jet flight cost?

Here’s what you need to know about actual flight pricing when buying private jet membership programs

Welcome to Jet Card Pricing 101. Pull up a chair and give me 10 minutes. Get ready to look at a bunch of numbers and tables. It might be a bit confusing, It might border on dull. However, it will likely save you tens of thousands of dollars on your private flights each year.

As you probably know, jet cards make flying easy. It’s closer to fractional or full aircraft ownership the hassles and downsides of on-demand charter.

That’s partly because jet cards make booking your next flight just one call, text, or tap on your smartphone away.

Don’t use the hourly rates companies publish on their websites or marketing brochures to figure out how much you will end up paying for your flights. Consider them merely one element in a somewhat complex math equation.

– Private Jet Card Comparisons

Over 40 providers offer fixed one-way rates and guaranteed availability in the Continental U.S. (Others offer dynamic pricing, which means they quote on a trip-by-trip basis similar to on-demand charter). The fixed-rate service area for programs extends to the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada, Hawaii, Europe, and beyond.

That’s important. It means you don’t have to pay the cost of repositioning the aircraft before or after your flight, something that is factored into on-demand charter quotes.

To get your contracted rate, virtually all cards give you a non-peak booking window from as little as 72 hours to a svelt six hours before departure. That can really come in handy when you need or want to go someplace on short notice. It’s also about as close to Uber as you can get when it comes to flying.

What’s more, virtually all jet cards provide service recovery guarantees you don’t generally get with an on-demand charter. These are important if your flight is canceled due to non-weather related factors.

Fixed-rate jet card programs typically include FBO fees. Some also include WiFi, deicing, and catering as part of your contracted rate.

However, every rose has its thorns.

When it comes to jet cards, most of the pricks are in the buying process. Understanding the terms and conditions of what you are purchasing is paramount but often overlooked.

Just tell me which program is right for me! The problem is if you don’t pay attention, those thorns can stick you hard when you get your first monthly statement.

One very common mistake is just scanning websites and brochures for pricing, then doing back of the envelope cost calculations.

Warning! Don’t use the hourly rates companies publish on their websites or marketing brochures to figure out how much you will end up paying for your flights. Consider them merely one element in a somewhat complex math equation.

Welcome to the world of jet card pricing

At the most basic, one might assume if the provider is advertising light jets at an hourly rate of $5,000, a 90-minute trip should cost $7,500, and a 30-minute trip should run $2,500, right?

Well, no.

To show you how published hours rates vary from what you will pay, I tapped into our exclusive Private Jet Card Comparisons’ Quick Compare Flight Pricing trip cost calculator for paid subscribers.

As you scroll down you will find four tables in this article.

The first, below, shows average and median flight costs for 30, 48, 60, 90, and 120-minute segments on light and very light jets. In total, we have 178 prices in our database for light and very light jets. However, what you see applies to other cabin categories as well.

But quickly, why did I choose these flight lengths?

It’s estimated around 80% of all domestic private flights are two hours or less.

You might wonder who makes 30-minute flights.

Users will give examples like Westchester County to the Hamptons or Nantucket and Orange County to Santa Barbara. Those quick hops replace drive times of four to six hours. Yes, private jets are time machines.

Now back to our Jet Card Pricing 101 class.

The first thing you will note in the table below is both the average and median flight costs for 30 and 48-minute flights are higher than the published hourly rate.

Yes, I’ll repeat for emphasis. With the vast majority of jet card programs, the cost to fly a sub-60-minute flight is more than the published price for a one-hour flight.

So let’s take a look…

The median published hourly rate for the 178 prices we have in our database of light and very light jets is $5,210. The median cost for a 30-minute flight is $5,773.

It’s the same when we look at the average flight cost. The average flight cost from the 178 published rates is $5,361. Yet, the average amount you will pay for a 30-minute flight is $6,737.

Most people would think that’s strange. You tell me you charge $5,210 per hour, but for a 30-minute flight instead of charging $2,605, I pay $5,773, more than your hourly rate.

Even when we look at the 90-minute flights, we find that you can’t use published hourly rates to accurately forecast the trip costs.

Again, using the median of $5,210 hourly rate, one might assume the cost of a 90-minute flight would be something like $7,815 ($5,210 x 1.5 hours). Instead, we find it’s $9,316, a multiple of 1.78.

If you were simply making an assumption for how much your 90-minute flights will cost from the brochure price, over 20 one-way flights, you would have underestimated your actual cost by about $22,210 in this example!

Why? We’ll get into the reasons a little bit later.

But next, let’s again look at published hourly rates for light and very light jets, and then actual flight cost rankings for our scenarios of 30, 48, 60, 90, and 120-minute flights.

In the chart below, we looked at the programs with the 25 lowest published hourly rates for light and very light jets. However, we have ranked them by their flight cost ranking across our five flight scenarios.

If you add up 1, 2, 3, and up to 25, then divide by 25, the product of that calculation is the number 13.

If you add the cumulative actual flight cost rank for the providers publishing the 25 lowest hourly rates (below), they together average 39 out of 178 in terms of the lowest actual cost.

In other words, if you are just looking at website and marketing brochure rates, you won’t necessarily be able to figure out what you are going to pay for your private flights or which program is most cost-effective.

See Published Hourly Rate Rank versus Actual Flight Cost Rank below…

The next table is organized the same way, except it shows the published hourly rate in the left handle column ascending from lowest published rate, and then where that program ranks in actual flight cost for our 30, 48, 60, 90, and 120-minute flight examples.

Note that the program with the lowest published hourly rate is only 16th cheapest for 30-minute flights, 71st for 48-minute flights, 30th for 60-minute flights, 11th for 90-minute flights, but second for 120-minute flights.

So, if you are wondering how a program with the lowest published hourly rate is only 30th least expensive for 60-minute flights, a big part of the answer is a hefty membership fee of over $70,000.

Is it a bad program?

Not at all. However, it’s structure favors multiple same-day flights with at least three hours of flying on those days. If you are doing several flights a day, and together they are more than three hours, it could well be an excellent choice.

Which brings us to the punchline of jet card pricing.

Like many things in life, the devil is in the details.

The last chart is below. For each of the 178 published light and very light jet hourly rates (lowest to highest in the left-hand column) in our database, you will see actual costs for those 30, 48, 60, 90, and 120-minute flights

Again, the first thing you will probably notice is the lack of direct correlation between published hourly rate and what you will pay for our various flight scenarios.

Just to pick on taxi time, understanding your flights and how taxi time is handled can be significant.

Assuming a $5,000 hourly rate and a 90-minute minimum, if you are doing a lot of 60-minute flights, the difference can add up.

Some programs include taxi time in minimums, others tack in on to the minimum.

In the case of a program that includes taxi time in a 90-minute minimum, excluding other factors such as fuel surcharges or amortized membership fees, you would pay $7,500.

Your flight was 60 minutes, which is less than the minimum (90 minutes) less taxi time (12 minutes), so you pay the 90 minutes. On the other hand, a program that bills taxi time as additional would bill your 60-minute flight as 90 + 12 = 102 minutes. The difference (1/5th of $5,000) is $1,000 per segment. Multiply that times 20 flights and that’s an extra $20,000.

So what factors impact jet card pricing, or more exactly, how much your flight will cost?

While our analysis was based on a single, only flight of the day, non-peak flight where you wouldn’t need deicing, below is a list of factors that will impact the equation of how much you are actually paying for your flight:

• Published Hourly Rate
• Daily Minimum
• Segment Minimum
• Taxi Time, and whether it is included in the minimums or additional
• Joining Fees
• Annual and Monthly Membership Fees
• Fuel Surcharges
• FET as applicable
• Peak Day Surcharges
• Deicing Charges
• Roundtrip Discounts
• Long-Flight Discounts
• Destination Surcharges (mainly outside the Continental U.S.)

Jet Card Providers

Who did we compare? Companies with pricing used in this analysis are Air Charter Service; Air Partner; Airshare (formerly Executive AirShare); Airstream Jets Inc.; Alliance Aviation; Concord Private Jet; Delta Private Jets, Inc.; Dominion Charter, Ltd.; Dreamline Aviation, Dumont Aviation; Executive Jet Management; Exec 1 Aviation (formerly DashJet); ExpertJet; Flexjet; FlyExclusive; International Jet; Jet Aviation Flight Services, Inc.; Jet Linx Aviation; Jet the World; JetSet Group; Jets.com; Luxury Aircraft Solutions; Magellan Jets; Netjets (including Marquis Jet); Nicholas Air; Northern Jet Management; ONEFlight International; Outlier Jets; Priester Aviation; Private Jet Services Group (PJS Group); Prive Jets; Quantum Jets; Sentient Jet; Silverhawk Aviation; Solairus Aviation; Starflight Aviation; Star Jets International LLC; Vault Jet; Velocity Jets; VistaJet; Wheels Up, and XO (formerly XOJET and JetSmarter).

Now that it should be clear website and brochure pricing is not the way the estimate actual flight costs, I recommend you read 36 Questions To Ask Before Buying A Jet Card.

And remember, for paid subscribers, in addition to head-to-head comparisons cover over 65 variables, plus our flight cost calculator, we provide personal assistance as well.