Share a ride, save a bundle?
By James Wynbrandt - April 1, 2010
Conceptually, it makes sense: share the expenses of a flight among unrelated fellow travelers and slash the cost of charter. But flight sharing, or per-seat charter, has proved difficult to translate into a workable model for travelers or charter entities. Witness the 2008 demise of DayJet, the Florida-based air-taxi startup.
Nonetheless, several companies continue to promote this budget-minded approach to charter flying, using a variety of service and revenue models. If you’re the type of person who wouldn’t mind sharing a business jet with a stranger, how close is per-seat charter to affecting your potential travel plans? That depends on where you’re going and when you want to get there. You can share a flight daily between the Northeast and southern Florida through one provider. But social-network-based companies established to book trips going anywhere you want to go admit they could be years away from arranging any meaningful number of shared flights.
Federal rules that prohibit charter flights from operating like airlines constrain the ability of flight-sharing services to schedule and market shared flights. To work within these strictures, a handful of flight-sharing promoters model their businesses on Web-based social networks.
Cogo Jets (www.cogojets.com), Jet Charter Pool (www.jetcharterpool.com) and Jet-It-Together (www.jet-it-together. com) are online businesses aimed at creating virtual communities of business jet travelers. Members looking for travel mates to share costs can post prospective flights or sign up for or suggest an alternate travel date for a posted flight. The flight-sharing company supplies a selection of aircraft and prices for all proposed trips. Once the prospective passengers have agreed on the arrangements, the company books the flight. The concept is simple,
but the execution isn’t.
“To do it within the DOT regulations, it even takes current members some time to wrap their heads around the best way to use this tool,” said Jamie Walker, president and CEO of Cogo Jets, a sister company of charter broker Jet Linx based in Omaha, Neb.
The social-network model also requires a critical mass of members to be successful. Cogo Jets, though declining to provide current membership numbers, estimated that it will need 100,000 members to become workable, and admitted it is years from reaching that figure.
“It’s not in our three-year plan,” Walker said. “A five-year plan is a little more realistic.”
Cogo, which originally charged $500 for the first year’s membership fee, has dropped its price to $99.
Jet-It-Together, which launched its site and service last June, claims more than 2,000 members and has had 34,000 searches for flights on its site and 160 trip requests. But the company declined to say how many shared flights it has arranged. John Ackerman, one of four cofounders of the Westborough, Mass. company, said interest has been strong from business jet travelers “frustrated with the high cost of fractional programs, card programs and buying hours up front.”
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