NetJets Doubled Your Bill While You Weren't Looking

A NetJets owner who paid $4,200 per hour for a Citation Latitude in 2022 still pays $4,200 per hour today. The rate card hasn't budged. His actual cost per trip? Up 41%.

The culprit isn't the advertised hourly rate—it's everything else. NetJets has quietly restructured its fee schedule to shift costs away from the headline number that prospects see during sales presentations and into ancillary charges that hit after you've signed the contract.

"Positioning fees" now average $2,800 per trip, compared to $1,950 two years ago. Peak day surcharges—applied during holidays, summer Fridays, and what NetJets calls "high-demand periods"—jumped from $850 to $1,400 per flight hour. International trip fees increased 35%. Even overnight crew charges rose from $485 to $675 per night.

The math is brutal for typical usage patterns. A NetJets owner flying 50 hours annually on a mid-size jet now pays roughly $47,000 more per year than the same usage cost in 2022, despite identical hourly rates.

Flexjet has followed the playbook. Their "dynamic positioning" algorithm—introduced in late 2023—adds an average of $3,100 to repositioning costs during peak periods. Wheels Up restructured similar fees in early 2024.

The industry's dirty secret: fractional operators discovered that prospects fixate on hourly rates during the sales process but rarely scrutinize ancillary fees until they're already committed. A NetJets spokesperson declined to comment on fee structure changes.

Here's what changed most dramatically. Positioning used to be calculated at cost—roughly $1,200 per hour of empty repositioning flight time. Now NetJets applies a flat fee based on "market conditions and aircraft availability." Translation: they charge what the market will bear, regardless of actual repositioning distance.

Peak day definitions expanded too. What used to cover major holidays now includes "market-driven high-demand periods"—essentially any time when charter demand spikes. That covers most Friday afternoons from May through September, the week before major holidays, and what one former NetJets scheduler called "basically any time you actually want to fly somewhere nice."

The positioning fee increase hits hardest on shorter trips. A two-hour flight from Teterboro to Martha's Vineyard that required 90 minutes of repositioning now carries a $2,800 positioning charge—making the total effective hourly rate 47% higher than the advertised number.

Savvy fractional owners are responding by clustering trips geographically and timing flights to avoid peak periods. Some are switching to jet cards with more transparent all-in pricing. Others are calculating whether whole aircraft ownership makes sense at these new effective rates.

The fractional model's core promise was predictable, transparent costs compared to charter. NetJets still markets that promise. They just redefined transparency to mean "we'll tell you all the fees—after you're locked in."