Subscription Jet Startup Makes Its Way To The East Coast

How do you make the very wealthy feel like the mega wealthy? Give them a chance to have a private jet service.

That’s the concept of two private jet startups, JetSmarter and Beacon, that have recently raised some mega money from investors to fuel their travel ventures. JetSmarter offers flights between New York and Miami and between San Francisco and Los Angeles, among other cities. When Beacon gets its wheels up this fall, it plans to offer around 18 flights a day between New York and Boston.

“Our overall goal is to make all air travel private,” Sergey Petrossov, founder of JetSmarter, told Forbes in an interview. “This year we intend to occupy 10,000 flights.”

JetSmarter recently raised $20 million, and its big bag of investors includes members of the Saudi royal family and top c-level executives from major companies, including Goldman Sachs and Twitter.

Of course, joining isn’t cheap. The minimum commitment from a person or company comes in at $9,000 a year. But these startups hope their travel-savvy executives understand the perks of having the private jet service without actually owning a private jet.

“At the forefront of this new era in travel, we believe that JetSmarter’s proprietary services and offerings have, and will continue to, revolutionize the industry,” Prince Abdullah bin Bandar bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a JetSmarter investor, said in a statement from the company, according to Forbes.

As for Beacon, the price is a bit less as it requires a three-month commitment for a $2,000 fee that allows for unlimited flights between New York and Boston. It also has raised some major funding and just recently announced $7.5 million in Series A funding, Forbes reported.

Like JetSmarter, the goal is to help the executive traveler realize that they are saving time and hassle that often comes with flying commercially. And especially the hassle that comes with driving between the two cities.

“You’re buying back time,” Beacon Cofounder Wade Eyerly told Forbes. “We take the pain out of the chore you have to do.”

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