Private Jet Travel: Ultra-Luxury Travel With Sky-High Commissions

Travel agents who specialize in luxury travel – or have upscale clients who might be interested in something different – may want to consider private jet travel.

Private jet travel can be sold as either a tour package or on an FIT basis. The tour packages are offered by major tour operators, including Abercrombie & Kent and Travcoa, smaller companies such as Remote Lands or a company like TCS World Travel that only does private jet tours and aircraft charters.

Even Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts has gotten into the act with its new Four Seasons Jet, a B757 that carries 52 guests and launched with a round-the-world trip this month.

Air travel hassles
In the FIT version of private travel, agents can use an aircraft charterer, for example Paramount Business Jets, which works with more than 200 American Express and other agents, to charter a plane for clients and create a custom packages.

Although it began about 25 years ago, this product is gaining popularity as dealing with air travel becomes more difficult and many busy people want to squeeze as much as possible into their short vacations.

“Our business is growing 25% per year in terms of number of trips,” said  S. Scott Leviton, director of guest relations at Seattle, Wash.-based TCS World Travel.  “Baby boomers want to travel, but airports are the biggest hassle in the world. That is why private jet travel is growing.

“Once clients have traveled by private jet they don’t want to go back. That’s what we’ve been hearing from agents we work with.”

Mary Ann Ramsey, president and owner of Betty Maclean Travel, a Virtuoso agency in Naples Fla., has been selling private jet travel since the early 1990s.

“There’s been an ebb and flow in demand,” Ramsey said. “It was really popular when I first started to sell it. The economy was good, and you couldn’t get a seat.

“It dropped in popularly, however, in more recent years because of the recession,” she added. “But it’s been slowly coming back, and now it’s back with a vengeance.”

C-suite clients
Who are the target clients for these tours?

For the FIT private jets, “they’re the chairmen of their own corporation or they own a large medical practice,” said Mary Ann Ramsey. “The older retired people tend to go on the private jet tours. Those people have time for the longer itineraries.”

Some of the most popular private jet tours created by tour operators tend to use planes that hold 52 to 70 or so passengers, and have itineraries covering large areas of the world.  

Other tours use smaller aircraft and concentrate on a specific area, such as Australia or Africa. The FIT private jet vacations can have as few as a single participant or a couple and are often families.

Although the tour operator programs usually average about three weeks, the private FITs are typically shorter, according to David Weber, managing director of R Crusoe & Son in Chicago.

“They might want to do a two-week program in China or South America or Europe,” he said. “Our clients call us and say, ‘This is what I want to do. These are the cities I want to go to.’ At that point we look at what aircraft are available to fulfill their needs.”

Geared for customization
From a sales standpoint, these operate like regular tours, but there is quite a bit of room for customization.

For clients who want custom private jet tours in a specific region, it makes sense to fly first class on a commercial airline to an initial destination—whether London, Paris Hong Kong, Singapore, Delhi or elsewhere—and then pick up the private jet and go from there.

Catherine Heald, co-founder and CEO of Remote Lands, Inc., offers an example. Her company specializes in Asia and about 20% of its clients fly privately.

“We have a family from Boston who is doing a big trip to Nepal, Bhutan and India,” said Heald. “They will arrive in Delhi on Emirates and are then taking a helicopter to Agra, Jaipur and back up to Delhi.

“Then they fly on a jet to Kathmandu and take helicopters all over Nepal, then get back in the jet and take it to Bhutan.”

Super commissions
With private jet tours priced at $40,000 and up, this type of travel provides excellent commissions and an incredible amount of repeat business.

“I wish I could sell private jet travel every day. I have sold five of these trips to the same couple,” said Heinke McDade of McDade Travel, an Ensemble agency in Roanoke, Va.

That couple – a man in his early 70s and his wife in her early 60s – have been her clients for 25 years and have taken a private jet trip every year since 2009. One year they took two.

On top of the price of the trip, the couple flies business class to the point where the trip begins – last year it was Australia – and purchases upgrades for many of their hotels.

For this year’s September trip, “the upgrades became available on Dec. 24. I started then and spent a lot of time determining what upgrades are appropriate for my clients,” McDade said.

McDade herself has yet to take a private jet trip, but it’s on her bucket list. “When I have the time to do it,” she said.