Duck - i disagree with youref JR
Duck ,
i disagree with you very radically, and in order to do so have joined pprune, specifically to make this post about Jet Republic.
It burst on to the scene a year ago. It sounds as if all the amazing marketing spend and material that we have encountered (outspending many more established Companies including ours), resulted in arranging about 20 charters a month, with about 80 staff. From the web site they look very highly paid sort of chaps. No aircaft. Pure brokerage. A competitor of sorts for us.
I have a brokerage. We arrange about 350 charters a month with 110 staff. Its hard work keeping the books balanced. Jet Republic have not only passed the last year outspending us on staff and marketing they did so by an outrageous country mile.
It has been very dispiriting for our professionals and no doubt others working hard in our industryto suddenly see a chap arrive announce in the papers a billion dollar aircraft order - strictly for the publicity of course-- (none of us professionals believed a single aircraft would fly) Then huge quantities of inordinately expensive marketing material landed on the doorsteps of our clients. And did so regularly. We knew that they didn't know what they were doing. that was obvious. We knew that the spending and behaviour patterns were not adding up to normal business practise. We felt, in fact hoped it would all fall over sooner rather than later as it was clearly a high octane p.r. nonsense.
We saw this chap suddenly feted as the spokes person for our industry, yet we knew he didn't know. It was galling. Yes, we predicted their demise but with a nagging fear of course: That a mexican billionaire may indeed just may fund 20 to 30 million usd a year of losses, for enough years to damage good Companies operating within their means.
We are very pleased the pantomime is over Duck. We genuinely think its right, proper and good news for the industry in the long run. Obviously with no aircraft being delivered, they clearly would have/should have kept customer deposits ring fenced, so they just spent the supposed 5 million start up funds too quickly Thats poor management. It would not have been rocket science to make it last until September, when the first aircraft arrived. It may spell the end of the flying timeshare fad, only time will tell. The ground based time shares ( flats in Spain) after an initial hard sell induced boom faded into a small niche area. Net Jets enormous losses just announced and now this schemes demise, may be the beginning of the end of fractionals as a major play, and it may just become a small niche market from here. I certainly hope so. its a hard sell marketing led product, not a customer led one.
sorry to disagree so strongly and have such a rant
Chris Leach
Chairman. Air Charter Service