Costco selling $17,500 subscription to Wheels Up private jet service

[fortran77]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/11/14/costco-wheels-up-private-jet-subscription/6295383002/

[hello_asdf]

Interesting, you’re still paying about $5k an hour from what I can see though. If you want to fly private and can afford it, it’s possibly a good deal.

[sova]

So that is the base price including 4k in credits for flights, presumably each trip costs add'l funds?

[kevin_thibedeau → sova]

The base appears to be $10k and you let Costco hold onto $7.5k of your money.

[redis_mlc]

There's various tiers of private jet service, from NetJets at the top to Wheels Up at the bottom.

I would compare Wheels Up to a condo timeshare, kind of.

You would have to do a fair amount of research to decide if Wheels Up is worth your while.

The Good

- smaller planes means cheaper flights

- two pilots

- the social features allow interesting things like common destinations and airport transportation, which would be great for sports fans, etc.

The Bad

- it appears Wheels Up is trying to package seats with multiple clients on the same flight (not so private)

- most of the planes aren't owned/leased by Wheels Up

- NetJets has a working business model, most smaller services don't

- $15,000 first year (plus time), $8,500 second year (plus time)

Source: commercial pilot who follows the trade press.