FractionalFocus - Blog

There has been a lot of talk early this week about Tiger Woods and how quickly he’s chasing down Jack Nicklaus’s record of most major tournaments won in a career. Which reminded me that the “Golden Bear” is featured in ads and in the company video for CitationShares, a joint venture of Cessna Aircraft and TAG Aviation. Citelines is the name of their fractional ownership program.

I first heard of Citelines when 3luxe, a company I founded with my brother, rated Citelines as one of the top three fractional jet ownership programs. And as I’ve done some follow-up research on my own, it’s not hard to see why it rated so well.

Like scalpers jacking ticket prices up for the most popular games, the main differentiating factor for Citelines is that they know there’s a difference between flying in the middle of May and the week of Thanksgiving. You can choose programs that offer the ability to fly on 365, 350, 335 or 320 days of the year. For each segment, they remove the busiest travel days, so the 350 travel day option won’t let you fly on the fifteen busiest flying days of the year. But the more peak days you eliminate, the more you save.

The way I see it, this makes it a wonderful option for businesses. I’ll have to do more research later on what the peak travel days are, but I’d guess that all of them have something to do with the major travel holidays (Thanksgiving, several days around Christmas and New Years, Easter/Spring Break, etc.). As a business traveler, you wouldn’t necessarily want or need to travel around those days.

Citelines offers three plane options, all built by Cessna: the CJ3 (6 passengers, a range of 2036 miles), XLS (8 passengers, a range of 2100 miles) and the Sovereign (9 passengers, a range of 3150 miles). They charge a one-time acquisition price, on top of a five-year contract with yearly operating costs.

Examples I found for the light jet, the CJ3, were for a 1/16th share (about 50 hours) on a 335-day program with an acquisition cost of $430,000 with an annual cost of about $195,940. For the medium jet (XLS) with the same deal, it would be $713,700 with about $238,245 annually. For the Sovereign heavy jet, the costs would run $975,000 with $260,120 annual fees.

The other area where Citelines wins approval from industry watchers is how they handle their annual fees. They work very hard to give customers accurate quotes on fuel prices, then offer them an easy to manage annual operating fee. You can pay once a year or in monthly installments.

I like the way Citelines has set up their model. They have a reputation for great customer service and being very transparent with their fees, and when considering an investment as large as this, I really appreciate that.