Brad - you're bang on.
Zolfen - I agree with some of what you have to say but you are wrong on one important point. It is possible for a computer to do all the work around a booking. Our computers have done about £1M of bookings like this in the last 16 days...
Private jets have two things going for them: Firstly they are flexible around the person where as with any kind of scheduled experience you need to be flexible around the aircraft. Second is in the name - Private. This is why there has never been a successful "seat sharing" company. They essentially take a private jet and turn it into a scheduled airline only a much more expensive one. This is where I agree with Zolfen; CEO's of "online private jet companies" that have never even been in one should not be allowed anywhere near the industry.
Empty legs: I believe that the Stratajet approach is the only one that is going to work. It retains the aircraft around the person approach but also offers substantial discounts with efficiency savings. Let me explain how it works...
Let us assume on Monday next week an operator has scheduled an empty flight from Madrid to Luton at 1300Hrs. By the way, with 2107 GA airfields in Europe this gives a total number of airfield pairs of 4,437,432 so the odds of finding one on the exact route at the exact time is basically zero.
Now, let's also assume the aircraft is next needed for a trip from Luton on Wednesday next week.
A new customer goes online and wants to fly from Barcelona to Manchester on Tuesday at 1300. Obviously a large part of this needs to be flown anyway but the question is how much of it is empty and how much is a new flight.
This is where the Stratajet Adaptive Empty Leg system kicks in. Essentially like this:
1) Work out the cost of the empty leg including all airport fees etc.
2) Work out the cost of Madrid to Barcelona to Manchester to Luton.
3) Work out increased landing, handling, parking, APD, Noise, Airways, TNC etc charges. (A Unique engine to Stratajet which 14 full time staff keep up to date)
4) Subtract the empty cost from the new cost and that's your base.
5) Put a much higher profit margin on for the operator.
6) Present to Customer in less than 10 seconds.
If you go to Stratajet.com and do a search these results are the ones at the top with the little Stratajet logo. I've just done a search for London to Genova on 7/7/16 and got some - give it a go. Booking is then done completely online including payment just like Skyscanner or any other travel website. Every now and then something goes wrong, we had two bookings this weekend which were impossible because someone had failed to update their schedule that the aircraft was in Maintenance. It wasn't a drama though, we just used another operator. These events are very much the exception not the rule and my client service team jump in and square it away so we always have happy customers.
Oh and final point. I've been flying for 20 years so yeah, I understand the product alright...