Four Ways to Make Flying Private Pay Off

Here are four ways to use your company’s charter budget or its own jet to reach your business goals, maximize revenue, and give you more time.

1. Stop Along the Way

The biggest difference between airline travel and business aviation isn’t necessarily the degree of schedule flexibility or the number of available city pairs. Those are important factors, of course, but a bigger difference might be that flying privately makes it easier to stop along the way to your final destination. How many times have you sat on an airliner while passing over a city and thought, “One of these days, I’ll have to figure out a way to go there and see that client”?

With charter or your own jet, you can always stop en route. So if your primary reason for a flight from Dallas is to go to Kansas City for a morning meeting, there’s no reason you can’t touch down in Tulsa to see a client on the way home.

2. Use the Hub-and-Spoke System

Here’s an idea you can borrow from the airlines. Say you’re based in Florida and have facilities or key clients across the Midwest. You might want to take an airliner to Cleveland, for example, and from there, use charter to visit the facilities or clients.

Let’s say you fly the airlines into Cleveland on Monday morning and drive to clients in the area that day. You could take a charter flight to Pittsburgh on Tuesday morning, another one to Huntington, West Virginia, in the afternoon, and another back to Cleveland for the night.

On Wednesday, you could hit Cincinnati after breakfast and Indianapolis in the afternoon, then fly back to Cleveland. Thursday morning, it’s Grand Rapids, Michigan, followed by a late lunch in Toledo, Ohio, and back to Cleveland for an early-evening airline trip home to Florida.

3. Make Whistle-stops

Keeping a staff motivated can be challenging, especially if your teams are geographically scattered, but business aviation can make the job easier. 

Related Article

8 Questions To Ask Before Booking A Charter Flight

A seasoned broker lists essential queries.

Use the company jet to make whistle-stops at all your locations. Have your regional teams come out to the airport to meet you at the FBO. Shake some hands, give a rousing speech, get them revved up, and move on to the next city.

4. Work the Territory

Perhaps you’ll need to introduce a new sales rep or manager to a territory.  If it’s a good-sized region, the company airplane will simplify the job.

In a week or less, you can hit every target market, introduce the new person to all your key clients, make joint sales calls to top prospects, and drop by all your company facilities in the territory. 

It’s better than driving, and not only because of the time saved. On a private flight, you can debrief the meetings you just held and discuss how you’ll handle the next stop. It’s hard to do that effectively if one of you is driving a car.