The romantic notion of trotting the globe in luxury by private jet needs a refresh for the digital age. Despite wildly fluctuating fuel prices and travel restrictions in the Middle East, global business jet travel is on the rise. Yet in many ways, the industry is still stuck in the past. Elevate Jet’s vision for the future could be just what luxury jetsetters need.
The commercial aviation industry was relatively new and heavily regulated when private jet travel emerged in the mid-1960s. Luxury operators took their cues from the Civil Aeronautics Board, a predecessor to the Department of Transportation. As a result, the country’s most exclusive commuter planes mimicked the best practices of mainstream airlines — an operating principle that still echoes to the present day.
What if this is a decades-old category error?
That’s the question animating Greg Raiff, the CEO of Elevate Aviation Group. Raiff believes private aviation should be treated as a hospitality experience, not merely transportation. Booking jets, managing schedules and processing payments are necessary functions of the industry. But why should they be the essence of the commuter experience? And why should luxury fliers be treated like ordinary commuters?
The Evolution Of Private Jet Service: Hospitality, Not Transportation
Elevate is primarily a full-service private aviation operator serving aircraft owners and high-net-worth charter clients. Raiff aims to elevate the game by focusing on “wow” moments and highly personalized services for those willing to pay a premium.
What does that look like? On one New York-based flight, the meal was serviced by Jōji Box, New York City’s premier sushi delivery service, while Manhattan institution Murray’s Cheese presented a cheese board with select fruits and nuts to add a deeper layer of indulgence to the experience. Beverage options included champagne and signature cocktails.
It’s an experience designed for those who are willing and able to pay for something better than a typical luxury jet trip. A flight from New York to Miami on a Challenger 650 might cost $32,300, but this is not merely a flight. Elevate can transform each jet into a well-hosted event with Michelin-starred restaurant catering, welcome gifts when you walk on board and bottomless Veuve Clicquot.
Unlike most private airline operators, Elevate’s employees have enough time and mental bandwidth to think creatively about customer delight. Basic operational competency (safety, catering, manifests, punctuality) are table stakes, not differentiators.
“Lots of people have airplanes,” Raiff said. “Lots of people have customer service agents. Lots of people have an app or tech, but I don’t know that there’s a company that thinks about private aviation and being the pinnacle of the hospitality industry, which is how I like to think about business. And so we’re just using tech to allow us to deliver that.”
The Private Jet Industry: A Fragmented System Built On Intermediaries
Raiff believes AI will dramatically reshape private air travel, eliminating many traditional customer-service and reservation roles. But he sees this as a response to shifting consumer tastes, not a force-fed technocratic future.
Those who don’t want human interaction before, during and after their flight will get the frictionless digital experience they crave. Those who enjoy human touchpoints will find employees accessible, able to focus on delivering a highly personalized experience, while Elevate’s app fulfills the least personal and most repetitive tasks.
The slow death of the taxi industry at the hands of Uber and Lyft is a useful but imperfect analogy. Like your standard metro taxi service, the luxury jet industry has been dogged by problems with third-party operators, handoffs, pricing inconsistencies and poor customer service. The cost of transportation only occasionally justified the return.
“We’re seeing a fundamental shift in private aviation, and it’s being driven by the traveler,” said private jet industry experts Mary Campbell and Anna Clark of TCS World Travel. “Today’s traveler no longer treats the flight as a logistical step to get through before the trip begins. They expect the time in the air to feel as considered and seamless as everything on the ground.”
The advent of the smartphone was a watershed. In the case of rideshare services, the key innovation also involved a category shift. Mobilizing privately owned automobiles eliminated the taxi fleet — and its upscale cousin, the limousine livery — as the primary source of rides. The supply of cars suddenly increased. So did the demand, driven by ease of use, greater availability, and a customer base eager for a wider selection of back seats. Hospitality and customer service were exploited as a market inefficiency.
Even before the shift from taxis to rideshares, large portions of the private jet market functioned as a patchwork of operators, brokers and platforms. In this system, even well-heeled fliers must accept shoddy trade-offs. Fractional ownership programs, long considered the gold standard, require multi-year commitments, significant upfront capital, and complex pricing structures that can vary depending on aircraft type, availability, and timing. Jet cards and membership programs promise flexibility, but the devil is in the details — restrictions, blackout dates, expiring funds. The experience is at odds with the luxury of certainty.
Elevate’s business model centers on reducing this fragmentation: eliminating unnecessary handoffs, simplifying booking, and providing pricing that is locked in at the moment of purchase. An app that gives you the cost upfront mimics the appeal of riding an Uber as opposed to a taxi. Elevate absorbs the risk itself if its initial cost estimate is wrong.
Rather than requiring long-term ownership commitments or tying clients to a specific aircraft category, the approach allows travelers to select the flight that best fits each trip, without interchange-style pricing adjustments or post-booking surprises.
Rethinking The On-board Experience For Private Jet Travel
The entire experience can be both luxurious and affordable. A flight from Roswell to Fort Lauderdale on a recent Tuesday, for example, cost $555. That is not the type of quote you will likely see from a competitor. New Mexico to Florida might not be your itinerary — but if it is, you’ll be stunned to pay less for a better, faster one-way ticket than you could likely find flying commercial. Deals like this are conveniently visible on the “hot deals” section of the Elevate app, which launched in February.
Elevate intentionally modeled aspects of its VIP airline business after older NBA charter operations pioneered by Northwest Airlines (now part of Delta). Athletes are still part of the target audience; Raiff’s network includes professional sports team travel directors. Celebrities and ultra-high net worth C-suite executives have populated Elevate’s planes for the last 30 years.
This helps explain why its AI agent is the best in class. An agent is only as good as the knowledge it is fed. Elevate’s 30 years of industry experience includes booking complex, multi-stop timed itineraries, sometimes at the last minute. It’s a degree of mastery a new generation of millionaires and billionaires has quickly come to expect. Many came from the tech industry, where first-time private flyers demand an app that works just as well as the one they used to grow their own fortune.
Critically, fliers using the app are quickly connected with real human advisors on demand. That layer of human service on top of a seamless digital product is rare for the private aviation industry — but increasingly common in the lives of the 1 percent.
Therein lies the groundwork for a divergence coming to the private aviation industry. On one side: legacy models built on ownership, exclusivity and long-standing brand recognition. On the other: emerging platforms focused on flexibility, transparency and a redefinition of service.
For an industry that has traditionally equated luxury with access alone, the next chapter may hinge on something more nuanced. But meeting a variety of demands while saving fliers time is easier said than done. In a category where time is the ultimate currency, that may prove to be the most valuable upgrade of all.
