When private jets are chartered, there is always a leg of the journey that has no-one inside the jet. These flights are available to you, at up to 75% off the normal price of a charter. Check it out..
South African company Get Jet is following a model which has become very popular in both the US and Europe, where multiple operators offer discounted ’empty leg’ flights to people whose calendars are flexible enough to be dictated by the empty-leg calendar.
And on some occasions it works out cheaper than low-cost airlines. This, from the DailyMail:
Stretching out in her cream leather seat, Sam Carr watches the British countryside blur into the distance as her private jet soars into the sky.
En route to Cannes, she and her fellow passengers — an intimate gathering comprised only of her husband Alexander and five of their closest friends — sip Moet & Chandon champagne served to them by one of their two pilots.
Less than two hours later, they’re landing at the small airport and being whisked off the runway in a taxi without so much as a crowded luggage carousal or passport-control queue in sight.
Of course, for celebrities or billionaire oligarchs there’s nothing unusual about this. But Sam is neither famous nor wealthy. She’s a middle-class mother-of-three more accustomed to holidaying in Center Parcs than on the Cote d’Azur.
‘It would never have crossed my mind that we’d ever be flying by private jet,’ says Sam, 41. ‘I had to pinch myself to believe it was happening.’
Nor had Sam, who works as an events organiser for a charity and her husband, a car sales executive, saved up for months in order to afford the luxury trip. For it cost them just £171 each — less than the £174 price of an easyJet ticket from London to Nice that week.
Like an increasing number of savvy Britons, they had bought what is described as an ‘empty-leg’ flight, which is the outward or return journey a jet will make to either pick up or drop off its full-fare- paying passengers.
Because it’s a trip the plane has to make, regardless of whether it contains any passengers, tickets are offered at dramatically reduced prices — sometimes over 75 per cent off.
[more here]
Will Mellor at Cape Town tech startup Get Jet says it’s not just the frivolous making use of discounted private-air travel “There is a trend amongst business people and pleasure seekers alike, to plan their trips around the Get Jet calendar. If a group of execs in Cape Town know they need to travel for business in Johannesburg, they will look at the Get Jet flights and go one-way on a private jet and take a commercial flight the other way. Why not make use of the time alone in a jet to discuss the meetings ahead? And at R28k for the whole jet – it’s cheap at the price!” For 8 people that’s about R3,500 a person.
Indeed. By the same token, private individuals can decide to do a quick weekend away that they otherwise wouldn’t have done (say Cape Town to Plett) if they see a flight become available. Then it’s just a hire car on the other side to get back to Cape Town.
I see the latest listings show a Cape Town to Phinda trip (6 people) for just R35k. Not the END of the world..
And Cape town to JHB at R28,650 (8 people).
With an app in development, it looks like the dream of private air travel is becoming more and more accessible.
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