Show HN: SimpleCharters – Compare and book private jets online | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SimpleCharters – Compare and book private jets online

simplecharters.com

Solid concept, but the pricing is way off base. I priced out a trip, and then compared it to other available options, and SimpleCharter was 55% (no typo) more expensive than what I found elsewhere, similar or better aircraft.

Thanks for the feedback! Feel free to shoot me an email at charles at simplecharters.com, I'd love to take a look at the searches and see why there was such a discrepancy.

Seeing well into 6 figures for a 600nm flight on a mid. Doesn't seem close to reality.

There is always the case for non-optimal pricing caused by a significant layover potentially combined with large repositioning costs. Again, I'd love the chance to take a look at your specific searches to see what's happening.

I submit this a couple years ago before the product was even built. Unlike other players in the space, we're not dealing with empty legs or per-seat pricing. Everything shown is guaranteed and processed in real-time. Feedback is always welcomed!

Couple pieces of feedback. I tried it out for some trips I commonly take in our aircraft (A36TN or 58P).

BED-OSU pulled up 3 choices, a Beech400A, Challenger300, and a G650. The Challenger and G650 couldn't use OSU, but that wasn't called out quite explicitly enough (IMO), and each chose a different alternate airport, neither of which chose CMH, which is overwhelmingly the logical alternative (IMO).

Similarly, booking that same trip from LWM only offered the two larger aircraft, with a departure alternate of ORH (rather than the closer and more sensible BED).

Our other common trip is to 60J, and the site chose ILM as the alternate (rather than CRE or MYR).

Realistically, you may need to start with street addresses to better inform the alternate airports. It's often the case that a charter customer won't know the possible airports, and blindly choosing an alternate without knowing where the customer wants to be is playing that game one hand tied behind your back.

Searching 8pax OSU-LAS in the middle of summer, I was offered a Hawker 800 departing OSU non-stop to LAS. To say that's a snug departure is an understatement; I doubt that would be a balanced field departure and under Part 135, that's going to be a no-go I'm pretty sure.

I also wasn't getting offered turboprops for some of the short searches I did. Makes little sense to fly a jet on a <30 minute hop generally, but that was all I got in New England for the searches I did.

You're trying to disrupt a market that's pretty difficult technically to make fully online. I suspect you're going to get a lot of bookings that end up not flyable as offered (and still have some work to do on the alternate proposals). Similar to dbenj's feedback, I also think your pricing is well above market, especially with jet fuel as cheap as it is now. That'll be easy for you to fix though.

I definitely wish you guys the best of luck, and happy to give any additional feedback if you want it.

I agree on the turboprop; was looking into services for some New England travel recently, and I thought a service like this would be useful for that.

If you're looking up here (and can get over the fact that it's a single), Planesense seems to dominate that market (or maybe I have PC-12 lust); I see a N___AF PC-12 on an awful lot of ramps around New England.

Thanks for the feedback! We're working on a more elegant solution to handle the alternate airports, balanced field length, etc. We're erring on the safe side right now, but there are always these edge cases.

As far as the prices, we're working on adding more aircraft everyday (lower repositioning costs, greater aircraft choices, etc). I'd love to ping you for some further discussion, especially around alternates.

Email's in my profile; happy to chat more. (And just to be perfectly clear, I don't think you're erring on the safe side on the 8 pax + 2 crew H800 out of 5000' runway at KOSU for a 1525nm non-stop. ;) The good news is the charter pilots will reject that; the bad news is your customers won't get what they thought they bought.)

One other random feature that may convert some users: show me where I can charter (or dry lease) a particular model.

If I'm considering a B200 or C501 purchase, I may be more inclined to charter or dry lease one a few trips first, but in that case, the model matters more than the price.

Maybe a corner case and surely I can find that on my own via aviation contacts, but maybe not all buyers can as easily?

If you've booked a private jet and paid north of $75k round trip, can you please share what was the rational behind it?

Note: I am genuinely curious.

It's very convenient, comfortable, and you don't feel like part of the heard. I often got sick flying on an airline (ton of germs on those things) and would be off work for a couple days - I can make the cost of a flight in a couple days if I am not sick - so thats my justification. Beyond that, being driven onto the taxi way and walking onto a jet on my schedule is perfect. We don't wait in lines, walk through customs or anything like that, in fact, customs usually comes on the jet.

Proof/My business partner and I - http://imgur.com/NNT96Ap

Thanks for the info CaptainCrunch.

I can make the cost of a flight in a couple days

This will be my motivational quote for the rest of the year.

Funny I was exactly looking for a private jet for a group, and could not find a good website with quotes.

That would be nice to be able to NOT filter by number of passengers, since I have no idea how much a jet cost and I want to see multiple planes and compare prices per capacity (I 'm with getting 5 people or 20 and go with either if cheaper or nicer plane).

Search for just 1 pax will probably do what you want, but there aren't enough operators in inventory now to really get a good feel.

I'd love to see you guys add Canada/USA routes - I'm using (well, my assistant uses) http://www.aircharterservice.ca to book all my private flights.

We're adding more inventory regularly and Canada is pretty high on the priorities. I'd love to discuss and get more feedback from you if you're open to it. Thanks!

I'm seeing several Hawaii airports (mostly interested in Maui) listed in your directory, but I'm none of them appear in destination field when searching. Any ideas why?

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