To illustrate this, I chose to talk about a particular company: Privatair (please note that I'm in no way affiliated to Privatair, and pictures in this post come from their website). This company is amongst the ones offering private taxi, together with JetAviation and a few others.
Such companies offer taxi services for businesses or wealthy individuals. If you can afford it, this kind of services has lots of advantages, including:
1) You define the schedule
2) You go through quick customs / security / immigration checks in the airport's VIP zones
3) A personal limo will take you to your plane, avoiding all check-in and boarding burdens
4) Aircraft performance permitting, they fly you to any small airport close to your destination
5) Personnal service on board is, let's say, above standard
Now, let's have a look and unveil some of the luxurious interiors that made the reputation of such way of travel... As mentioned before, Privatair operates quite a wide fleet, so I selected some pictures from their website for different size of aircraft.
Start with a LearJet 60, for a handful of passengers.
As you can see, the interior is tiny, but quite cosy... I hope you noticed the flower and the bottle of champagne on the table.
If your clan is a bit bigger, you can then opt for a Global 5000, which offers more room.
I personally slept in some hotel room that were not so well equipped !
Last but not least, if you're travelling far away with all your (extended) family, why not renting a 767 ? Yes, you read correctly, a 767, even one with extended range...
At this point the question are: who uses that, and does it really make sense ? The first answer is quite obvious: there is a market for such companies. They flew for years, and in some busy airports, they can represent up to 30% of the traffic !Apart from a few very wealthy and inactive people, most of the
customers are businessmen moving from one part of the world to the other. In an economy where salaries of top managers can be expressed in thousands of dollars a day, the shareholders probably don't want them to be waiting inactively, or spending hours in transfers and connecting flight, don't they ?And video conferencing or e-mail can't solve all problems, there
are still cases where a good old handshake is needed. And in such cases, planes just become time saving machines...To finish with an little story, you should know that even working at the airport, and having good friends working there, it's just IMPOSSIBLE to get on board of such planes for a short visit... secrecy's one of the first values of such companies...
