Empty Seats on Charter Flights

Stuff empty seats, flying in Style with the services of Portland National.

Maine Aviation Corp., which was taken over by a Portlander-born pioneer, is offering vacant seats on privately owned aircraft to the general public at greatly reduced rates. Collegiate friends Johnny Sengelmann, 24, who raised in Portland, and Timmy Wozniak, 28, from Denver, founded Fresh Jet, a firm modelled on Airbnb.

Whilst this successfull website finds accommodation for those who want to hire a home or room are looking for accommodation outside the home, fresjets. comatches flyers with empty privatjets. A 16-piece plane that flies from Portland to New York City and normally costs 9,466 dollars, for example, can be reserved for 1,499 dollars. There are many benefits to using privately owned aircraft over commercially owned aircraft:

The seats are more spacious and comfy, there are no safety locks and there is no need for early arrival at the terminal - pilots guide you to your seats, and personal aircraft can take you to smaller airfields and bring you much nearer to your destination. Mr Sengelmann stated that Fresh Jet was trying to generate income from the substantially wasteful flight times.

Often privately chartered aircraft empty for charter to the terminal where the charter passenger docks. According to Sengelmann, these one-way journeys make up about one third of all charter flights and constitute a drop in turnover for the Group. Charter operators usually try to occupy these places by doing business with brokerage firms who resell flights to customers for a fee.

Headquartered in Denver, Fresh Jets has established a dedicated online marketing platform that links these flights directly to prospective clients. She has chartered airlines with flights to most large US capitals as well as overseas flights to China, Brazil, Mexico and Paris. The Fresh Jets company earns cash by paying charter airlines a 15 per cent reservation charge.

Sengelmann, who completed Portland High School in 2008, says that those who enroll for the program can buy seats in a personal plane for the costs of doing bus classes and, in some cases, in an airline plane. Port of Portland-based Maine Aviation, which provides charter flights, aircraft servicing and other related support has recently entered into a partnership with Fresh Jets.

Wednesday, a Fresh Jones website charter flight scanning from Maine Aviation showed nine available flights to or from Portland. A nine-seater plane flew from Portland to New York City at the same time. Headquartered at Northeast and Florida Airport, Maine Aviation currently has 11 charter planes that range from a 16-seater luxurious plane to lightweight jetliners and turbo-props.

Maine Aviation's Robert Lombard, executive vice president of charter sale, is not sure how well Freshjets.com will work, but said the company's online service seems to offer a more " translucent " choice of prices and choices to the consumer. "He said it removed the brokers from the trial and gave more immediate exposures to those passing through.

They both worked in "guest services" at small aerodromes after graduating from school, which meant welcoming and organising passenger transport and car hire for them. There, they found out that many privately owned planes flew empty on a routine basis and that the airline had not yet found a good way to fill these seats.

The Fresh Jet, which was started in February, employs six staff, among them the two company owners. Around 1,500 passengers have registered for the services, which offer flights from 17 charter airlines with a total of 313 aircraft and turbo-props. This is less than 1 per cent of the 19,000 corporate jet aircraft that can be hired in North America.

The majority of flights are offered in the southwest. Wozniak said, however, that the company's expansion is huge as there is a $12 billion stock in the charter airline world.