Marquis Private Jet Card
Marquis Jet Partners, Inc.
There are a number of reasons why an organization or an individual might want a plane at their disposal. Unfortunately, planes don’t come in Cracker Jacks boxes. Traditionally, one could buy or lease a plane, or share ownership with a fractional ownership plan.
The problem is that buying, leasing, or fractional ownership which begin at a minimum of five-year commitment and ranges anywhere from between $500,000 and $750,000 and up. This is a one-time cost to buy into a five- year contract. Once that money is spent, the client is given access to the plane, and is still charged an hourly rate for flying, monthly maintenance fees and other costs (fuel, plane transfers, etc.). When the contract is expired, the client also is charged a resale fee. For many, particularly when first putting their toe into the general aviation pool, this is a very difficult decision indeed, and one potentially fraught with long-term financial peril.
An appealing alternative is the Marquis Private Jet Card.
You start by looking over the Marquis fleet (which is actually the NetJets fleet) and decide what kind of plane you are likely to use. Planes include the Falcon 2000, Hawker 800XP, Cessna Citation V Ultra, and Cessna Citation X, so you can carry between 7 and 10 people on a flight. That done, you buy a Private Jet card for somewhere between $109,000 on the smaller jets and $225,000 on the bigger jets. This gives you 25 hours of time on that class of plane. Scheduling is on demand, but you need to give ten hours notice. As you would expect, Marquis is also equipped to handle related travel needs, such as hotels, dinner reservation, and almost anything else you would expect in this circumstance.
The benefit of this service is that you have a fixed commitment with full FAR 135 service. Thus, if you were a professional athlete or rock band, and weren’t sure you wanted to make a financial commitment of half a million dollars for a five year period that might extend beyond your career, this would be an excellent option. By the same token, if your company wasn’t sure it wanted to take on the responsibility and cost of running an aviation department, this would be a good, limited liability, way to discover if having a jet at your disposal was, in fact, cost effective for the organization.
