From the earlier AirChicago business. This original material describes past programs, people or events. Prices, schedules, memberships and endorsements here are not current offers or representations of today’s website. Explore current travel options.
March 8, 2017 – 8:00AM
Written by: Captain David Koch
Example of How Door to Door Travel Times Can Influence How You Travel
Retail charter is the most popular way to access private-jet aircraft. The basic concept is simple although the execution may not be. Let’s look at a typical example: You’re in Chicago. You need to be in Rapid City, SD for a lunch meeting the day after tomorrow. Three associates are traveling with you for the meeting. You have 3 travel options for this trip: drive, buy a ticket on United, Delta or American, or charter a private jet (Amtrak does not operate between Chicago and Rapid City).
Drive It
The drive will take you about 13-hours door-to-door. The cost will be about $550 in direct driving expenses at $0.55 per mile. Obviously, it will take you all day to drive to Rapid City. So, you’ll have to overnight for a next-day meeting. And you get to spend over 13 hours in a car with your coworkers.
Fly It
The airline option will require you to leave early in the morning on the day before the meeting because all the airlines flights arrive in Rapid City in the late afternoon or evening. Also, you’ll have to get up in the wee hours of the morning, leave from ORD or MDW and make a connection in Minneapolis, Denver or Dallas/Ft. Worth. The travel time with a connection will be over 13-hours and it will cost you around $1,600 per person in airfare (round-trip). This option will also require you to leave home at least 3 hours before the scheduled departure time and subject you to the rigors of airline travel (including a dreaded connection). Your door-to-door travel time will be at least 17-hours if you’re lucky.
Charter It
Or, you could charter a private jet. The private jet will depart from an airport within a 30-minute drive of your home or office. This means that you could get up at a reasonable hour and you’ll have to leave home only 45-minutes before departure time. The non-stop flight to Rapid City will take only about 1:45 and you will avoid all of the hassles associated with airline travel. Your door-to-door travel time will be less than 3-hours. It will cost you about $9,600 in a chartered light jet (round-trip). If there are 3 people traveling with you (4 total) the cost per person will be $2,400. Another advantage with the chartered-private-jet solution is that you can leave at a comfortable time in the morning, fly to Rapid City, hold your meeting and still be home before dinner time the same day. And the flights at both ends will depart when you want, not on a rigid airline schedule.
In this case, you can probably justify the additional cost of the chartered jet because you are going to save heaps of non-productive time for you and your associates. And, you will save the costs of 2 overnight stays. Not to mention the fact that with the drive or airline options, you will be on the road for the better part of 3 days and 2 nights whereas with the charter option you will be out of town for less than 1 day.
Booking Your Charter Jet
So, how do you go about booking a charter flight? There are several online booking platforms like Air Charter Guide. However, when you use one of these platforms you won’t have much useful information about the safety and reliability of the charter operator you book with. An alternative is to do your homework and establish a relationship with a local charter operator. This will require a considerable amount of time and effort and you’ll need a considerable level of industry knowledge to do a good job of it. It is also possible to work through a charter broker, but the same homework requirement applies to checking out a charter broker.
There are 2,155 U.S. air-charter operators that operate 10,655 aircraft to more than 3,000 airports in the U.S. The companies average 19 employees, have only a couple of aircraft and report less than $2.5 million in annual revenues. Business jets account for 30% of the fleet (3,197 jets), with the remainder made up of pistons, turboprops, and helicopters. There are approximately 25 air-charter operators in the Greater-Chicago area that operate over 100 business jets. These aircraft are chartered relatively infrequently. So, there is ample availability.
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