Lifestyle

Champagne Dreams? Texas Start-Up Has Your Ticket to the Jet Set

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Tony Maples Photography

 

Opening its doors in Houston, Texas in 2016, TapJets is a private jet business aiming to please. With a wide selection of turboprops, mid-size, long-range, and light jets, the company is geared towards getting you into the air in Uber-fashion. In fact, the Houston Chronicle recently quoted their CEO as saying they want to become the “Uber for private jets.”

TapJets’ CEO Eugene Kesselman envisioned a need for this unique start-up based on the number of private jet flights which resulted in the potential for one-way taxiing and the possibility for increased air pollution “In a nutshell, there are 1.1 million private jet flights per year. That’s about 3,000 flights a day. Some of those are empty planes with no passengers and just pilots, polluting the air for no reason,” he explained.

In order to meet what TapJets saw as a burgeoning need, they developed a smartphone app which connects its passengers to pilots for various flights on private jets or planes. Similar to Uber and Lyft, the pilots are given a rating by system users so that frequent flyers can rest assured that someone competent is getting them where they need to go. Customers have the option of selecting various size jets and planes as well as choosing simply air or a mixture of both air and ground transportation services. This service also provides users the opportunity to bid on select flights for greater discounts, and for those who are quite flexible in their travel plans, TapJets website and app can be a great alternative to waiting on standby somewhere. Since their establishment, they’ve scheduled 480 flights, and the sky’s literally the limit for this Texas company!