Today, anyone equipped with a smartphone can reserve an AirBnB, call an Uber or stream Netflix, all with the flick of a wrist. And now the app-based entrepreneurial spirit has taken flight in the aviation industry. Dallas-based Rise is connecting the frequent flyers of Houston, Dallas, Austin and now Midland with air travel via private jet.
Skip the long ticket queues, bypass customs screenings and downtime in an airport terminal, along with all the hustle and bustle of commercial air travel. Rise takes you between the economic hot spots of Texas with affordable luxury. The service targets the frequent business travelers’ market, and, in Midland, that means the oil and gas executives often caught in the back-and-forth between Midland and Houston or Dallas.
The aviation company offers a subscription-based, all-you-can-fly service for a monthly fee, starting at $1,650. This might seem like a high price tag on the surface, but could be cost-effective for those traveling at least four times a month.
“For the commercial airlines you pay $500 to $600 to get to Midland, but if you wanted to fly private, you would charter the whole plane,” said Rise co-founder Clynt Taylor. “That cost is going to be $8,000 to $13,000, so there’s a big gap. That gap is what we’re aiming to sell. You don’t need to fly a whole plane, and you don’t want to fly commercial, so we came up with this idea of private flight sharing.”
The business model takes a page from companies such as Uber, Lyft and AirBnB by matching passengers to seats in planes. Rise does not own or operate the aircraft; the service partners with the aviation companies already in the charter business. Yet, each plane — a Beechcraft King Air twin-engine — is emblazoned with the Rise logo on the exterior so that it "feels like a Rise experience,” Taylor said.
“Many thought it was just another rich-man’s service. But no, it’s the frequent-traveler’s service,” he said.
Rise’s operations began two weeks ago, and the first scheduled flight touched down at Midland International Air & Space Port the evening of July 12. Since then, four flights have hit the MIA tarmac.
The company begin servicing a city a fraction the size of Texas’ major metropolitan areas, while larger markets — such as San Antonio and El Paso — have yet to be tapped because Rise realized a demand existed.
“We found out that the need to go to Midland has grown so quickly,” Taylor said. “We had our members in Dallas and Houston — a lot of whom are in the oil business — saying, ‘I need to go to Houston, I need to go to Dallas, but I also need to go to Midland.’ Our members tell us where to go, and we prioritize our routes based on that.”
Still in its early stages, the company has already acquired hundreds of members, about 30 percent of whom are in the oil and gas or related industry, by Taylor’s estimate. And while its Midland-based membership pool is smaller and only able to support weekly flights to Houston and Dallas, the number of members relative to the city’s size is disproportionately large.
Flights to and from Midland will be “minimal at first until we add more members in Midland, and then hopefully it grows quickly, and we’ll start adding more flights,” Taylor said.
One company already riding the trend is Midland-based Tall City Exploration, an oil and gas exploration and development company. CEO Michael Oestermann was among Rise’s first Midland subscribers. He wanted to give his employees an easier time getting to Houston and back.
“We have some employees who work in Houston, and they commute back and forth, so we were looking for an alternative to commercial service that was a little faster and a little easier on them,” Oestermann said in a phone interview from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. “It’s pretty tedious to fly every week through the airports, and it saves them a lot of time.”
Two of Oestermann’s employees were among the eight-passenger maximum on Rise’s maiden Midland voyage to Houston. Travel time from door to door is cut in half, he said.
“It’s useful to us now, but we’re hoping that it will grow and have a lot more routes to choose from,” Oestermann said. “It’s limited right now, but it’s not a bad start.”
The company expects to continue expanding its service to several other cities in the southwest as membership demand directs its future routes. San Antonio, Tulsa and Oklahoma City are next on their list, according to Taylor.
“When you’re on the planes, you find interest in the people you fly with, rather than opening up the laptop,” Taylor said. “The other day, we were flying to Houston, and, by the time we landed, two guys made future appointments to meet, and another two shared a ride home. It was a sense of community that we realized was really cool.”
Source: http://www.mrt.com
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