Life
How You Can Travel On A Private Jet For $109
For those of you who have always wanted to live like a celebrity (even for just a night), you can now ride a private jet for the cost of a normal plane ticket — and no, this is not a joke. Private jets are something usually reserved for the rich and famous (right up there with yachts, assistants, and Beverly Hills mansions), but now you can get a little taste of the high life... for only $109.
The California-based company JetSuite offers affordable jet travel, currently just on the West Coast. With flights between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the offerings are limited right now, but hopefully will expand. Starting next week, you can book tickets for a one-way trip between airports like Buchanan Field and Bob Hope in Burbank, starting at $109 (and of course, going up, some of the highest being at $300).
“It’s a private jet-style experience for the price of an airline seat,” JetSuite CEO Alex Wilcox told Condé Nast Traveler. “We looked at some short-haul markets in California where people fly a lot, and we found that while nationwide, traffic is up, there are fewer people flying those (smaller) markets every year,” he says, attributing the drop to “higher costs and less convenience” brought on by industry consolidation.
The flights offer business class-style seats as well as 36-inch seat pitches (the distance between a point on one seat to the same point on the seat in front of or behind it), which is to say, it's spacious. Other features include free Wi-Fi and streaming, and of course, a private terminal.
With all of that said, unless you actually rent a full jet for yourself (which is an option, according to their site), you will probably not have the "private" experience just yet. Most carriers hold about 30 seats, so despite the fact that they aren't the literal definition of private, they do offer some other super cool perks, such as points on JetBlue, access to smaller airports, shorter flights, and of course, a cozier traveling experience (a 15-minute check-in-to-take-off time range isn't a bad feature, either).
"We’ve been perfecting private jet travel, and now with the introduction of JetSuiteX and the E135, we are revolutionizing the landscape of air travel," the company promises. They claim that they are trying to make air travel that's cheap, accessible and exhilarating a reality, and their goal is for everyone to feel as though they have a private jet. So while you might have to wait a little while (or hope you become friends with an actual millionaire) before you can get yourself to fly across the world like a Kardashian, you can have a taste of the high life beginning next week, when tickets go on sale.
