Private Jet Card Comparisons: ‘Helping smart people make smart decisions’

“Before we came along people had to make ten calls to get brochures, to talk to people, to get the data that we all have in one place,” Doug Gollan, founder and president, Private Jet Card Comparisons told CJI.

It was an idea that grew from an article. Today it is Match.com meets Consumer Reports. For founder, president and editor-in-chief of Private Jet Card Comparisons Doug Gollan it is all about “helping smart people make smart decisions based on data”.

The company which acts as a comparison platform focused on North American jet card and fractional programmes, offers amalgamated, updated data from more than 80 providers and over 1,500 programme options judged across 65-plus variables. It also helps clients understand what the best options are for their needs. 

Largely serving individual subscribers, the company has recently begun offering its product to corporate flight departments and wealth advisers through tailored enterprise subscriptions. 

“As a journalist, I hate saying this, but I think we’re the only people who do what we do,” Gollan told CJI. “We don’t make recommendations or consult. We don’t sell subscriber contact information like lead generation sites. We give consumers the data they need to compare options – fit the pieces of the puzzle together, the information and education about the basic ‘how it works.’ The people who fly privately are smart people and they want to make their own decisions. They just need the data and a bit of help to get there. That’s what we do.”

In some cases it is a bit like a first grade 101. Sales people are known for throwing around industry terminology – primary service area, daily minimum, call-out and peak days are a few of Gollan’s favourites. 

“If you think about peak days, some programmes say, ‘We don’t have peak days,’ but they do, they just use some other term that essentially means the same thing. We explain, whatever they call it, here are the things that can happen on those dates,” he said. “They can move your flight by X number of hours. There could be a surcharge. There’s a longer window to book. There are more restrictive cancellation policies. The seat guarantee is different. There are different upgrade terms. So take a look at that calendar. If you’re going to have to fly on those dates, make sure you understand those terms. That’s part of the data we provide.”

Reading customer reviews of Private Jet Card Comparisons it is clear the company does not just provide the data. Multiple testimonies have likened the product to a concierge service. 

“It’s not just the data and then you’re on your own,” he explained. “You can email us with questions; you can set up time to talk on the phone. Our busiest days are Saturdays and Sundays because that’s when people – busy during the week – have time to go back and look at private aviation.”

Origins

Back to the beginning. Gollan, the son of a leading aviation journalist, followed in his father’s footsteps. Any notions his parents might have had for him outside of aviation were quickly quashed; as a child, when his peers were swapping baseball cards, Gollan was collecting airline timetables on each visit to the airport to welcome his father home from business trips. 

“I would make up timetables for my own airlines. I really liked aviation,” he recalled. “I wanted to be a pilot but I have very bad eyesight and I was horrible at math.”

During college Gollan interned at his father’s magazine before getting a job covering airline news in the heady days of post-deregulation. He soon moved into the publishing side, producing B2B magazines that were distributed to travel agents. Then in 2001 he and some partners founded Elite Traveler, an in-flight magazine for private aviation. He was there until 2014 when he sold his minority ownership share. 

Gollan is also a contributor to Forbes which augments its core editorial staff with experts who cover niches. In 2016 he began researching a story on jet cards which took him a “lot longer than expected”. 

“About nine months of research because I kept finding more companies,” he said. “Each time I’d get one of their brochures and they talk about what they give you but not what they don’t give you and what they charge extra for.”

“One brochure would say you can fly at these guaranteed rates to Mexico, but the other didn’t mention Mexico. When I’d go back to them, they’d say, ‘Oh no, Mexico’s not in our programme.’ Or one would say de-icing is included, and two others didn’t mention de-icing. When I’d go back to them, they’d say, ‘Oh no, de-icing we charge extra for.’”

Being a journalist, Gollan’s notepad is never far away. But having spent time in management, his Excel skills weren’t far behind. 

“I started to put everything into spreadsheets because there were just so many differences,” he explained. “When I finished the story I’d accumulated all this data. A couple of the CEOs I’d been interviewing suggested that I try to put up a buyer’s guide. There are some lead generation sites where companies buy the leads that come in, but they said, ‘We don’t want to pay you. We want you to charge the consumer for the data. That’ll save consumers time. That’ll help educate them. They also understood that the consumers who go through our process would be serious buyers who are ready to make a decision. It is more efficient on the sell side to talk with an educated consumer who already understands your program. The providers also appreciate we have no dog in the hunt.”

How it works

Private Jet Card Comparisons began with a $99 WordPress website in 2017. Over the preceding years it has had more than 7,500 paid subscribers. Today an annual membership costs $500. Gollan said Private Jet Card Comparisons is often not the “first call”. Usually it is the fourth or fifth, because after speaking with a few companies people are “thoroughly confused”. 

“People who fly privately are doing so to save time, but now they’ve spent two weeks – four or five hours – trying to figure out which solution is best for them and they feel like they’re still at square one,” he explained. “So for $500, they think, ‘Let me find somebody who can help us out.’”

Clients answer an online questionnaire detailing what they’re looking for. “It is like Match.com meets Consumer Reports,” Gollan quipped. “Based on what they’re asking for, we go into the database and say, ‘These are the programmes and the specific providers that fit what you’re looking for.’”

The next step for users is to talk to the providers. Private Jet Card Comparisons does not negotiate for them, but it will answer any questions they have. 

“Sometimes people come back and say, ‘Who would you choose?’ The answer is: first of all, it’s not us, it’s you. It’s a lot of money and it’s your money. But when they talk to the companies armed with the comparison data, it works. They really wanted to make an educated decision. They just needed the data and a bit of help. After they talk to the companies they either come back and tell us they joined a company, they’re down to two companies, or we hear from them in ten months when they need to buy more hours, or they tell us they joined a fractional programme,” said Gollan.

The company updates its data more than 160 times per year, said Gollan.

A big part of enabling understanding for clients comes from analysis of the fine print. A good example is the maximum seat counts for aircraft categories and types in guaranteed rate programmes. On a light jet, it could be anywhere from five to eight seats. “So if some of your flights are with eight people, and the guarantee is for less seats, you could find you need to use a midsize or super mid-size and then you could find out upgrades aren’t guaranteed, there are different policies such as daily minimums, and so forth,” explained Gollan. It’s not something the average consumer is thinking about, he added.

“We really just help them navigate the fine print so that they land in a place where these contracts – which go anywhere from five to 50 pages – fit their needs,” said Gollan. “Nobody reads fine print contracts, right? We’re just there to help them navigate and make sure that when they send the money, when they sign the contract – a lot of which are non-refundable – they end up in a place where the rules and policies fit what they’re looking for.”

Gollan and his team are always on hand to answer any queries. Many of his subscribers also have his mobile number. “They’ll text me or just call me,” he said. “I was out for a walk yesterday, my mobile rang and it was a subscriber. He had a couple of questions and we chatted and he got his answer.”

Smart people, smart decisions 

If someone wants to fly from South Africa to London, they probably wouldn’t call Japan Airlines. But with business aviation each programme is structured differently: where they’ll fly at guaranteed pricing, what type of aircraft, how many seats, what’s included, daily minimums etc. “Yet all the advertising is pretty much ‘we’ll help you, anything you need, we’ll do it’ – so using the airline analogy, you could fly on Japan Airlines from Cape Town to Tokyo to London, but it might cost you twice as much as another company. It wouldn’t be an optimal choice. There are similar principals in terms of the private aviation providers, their programs and the sweet spots for each,” said Gollan. 

Clients often ask if the company can “really give as much help as I need for $500?”. The answer Gollan gives is “Yes, nobody abuses it. They’re busy people”. 

“They only want certain questions answered,” he explained. “But on the second or third time, they’re talking to me about, ‘Doug, I looked at this programme but the daily minimums are this.’ And I always tell them, ‘Listen, if you’re ready to run private jet card comparisons, you know as much as I do.’” 

This where regularly updated data comes alongside Private Jet Card Comparisons’ guidance comes into their own – the company has refreshed its database more than 100 times so far this year. 

“It’s not celebrities we’re dealing with,” said Gollan. “It’s the people who took dad’s business from two locations to 17 states in the US, or they started a business in their basement or their garage, or some of them are C-level executives. They’re smart people and they don’t need our opinion on what we think of this company or that company. They need the data and they just have basic questions like, ‘Tell me again, what is taxi time? What does that mean?’”

Horses for courses 

Generally, Private Jet Card Comparisons serves individual subscribers who are looking to buy a fractional share or jet card for their own needs and wealth advisors who provide access to their clients via its Enterprise Direct service. But in March this year it expanded its service to include corporate flight departments. These operations are typically looking for supplemental lift, said Gollan. 

“For corporate flight departments, they already have aeroplanes. Quite a few of them already have fractional shares too. But fractional programmes only guarantee one aeroplane a day. So they typically use jet cards and charter brokers. The brokers use dynamic pricing,” explained Gollan.

Flight departments use the database to make sure that they can benchmark internally they are paying a fair price. “They use our quick compare flight pricing,” he said. “We have a 2.0 version coming out in the next 90 days, but you can say 90 minutes or 180 minutes on a midsize jet and it’ll give you the cheapest to most expensive fixed guaranteed rate pricing, so they can see how their broker pricing compares.”

Private Jet Comparisons also helps flight department managers to answer the constant stream of ‘what if’ questions from finance and procurement. “As part of the database, we have guaranteed hourly rates for aircraft types. Let’s say they’ve got Challenger 300s – they own two of them. They need to know if they went into a fractional programme or a jet card programme or for supplemental lift for charter, what’s the market hourly rate for those,” said Gollan.

Another use case is when executives already own a plane and want to use it for company travel. The flight department now needs independent third-party data on what’s a fair market price to reimburse that executive. 

“They can go in and say the executive owns a CJ-3, they can find out the range of hourly rates on a CJ-3 so that if they ever got audited, it’s not ‘Joe told me to do it’ or ‘Joe told me this price’ – they have the data from Private Jet Card Comparisons that says if they had chartered that type of aircraft, here’s what they would have paid,” he explained.

“Before we came along people had to make ten calls to get brochures, to talk to people, to get the data that we all have in one place,” Gollan concluded. “By giving the corporate flight departments and the users of private aviation access to the data, it just saves them dozens of hours of time.”