TAXI !!!

Beyond the ability to stay connected and productive from wherever you happen to be on a given day; business travelers and road warriors also yearn for a means of travel that will get them from A-to-B in the shortest amount of time and with the least amount of hassle.

While we don’t yet have the ability to call our own personal transporter chief and say “Beam me up Scotty,” so called Air-Taxis (or Air-Limos) have been generating a whole lot of interest of late, and might be just what the mobile businessman (or woman) is looking for.


According to interviews I’ve heard, there are more than 19,000 airports in the United States, but only some 400 offer scheduled commercial flights. That leaves several thousand smaller airports out of reach to the average business traveler. Often times these smaller airports are a lot closer to where we want to be for business and sales calls. The idea of an Air-Taxi is a smaller, lighter, more affordable alternative to a private jet; but with the same on-demand kind of availability.


For more information on some of the players in this hot space, check out the websites of Air-Taxi operators DayJet, Linear Air, and POGO.


Technology guru Esther Dyson recently covered the air taxi trend in the June issue of her Release 1.0 Newsletter. In this issue, titled, “Visible Demand: The New Air-Taxi Market,” Ether writes:

“The air-taxi market is not about luxury travel or vacation getaways. It's about productivity: more time on the ground to make that extra sales call before getting home for dinner, instead of getting caught in the productivity-sapping hub-and-spokes commercial flight system that takes all day (not to mention a hotel stay), leaving room for only one sales call.”

Esther also produced an interesting video on the subject, including an interview with Vern Raburn, CEO of Eclipse Aviation (a company manufacturing the jets that are making this trend a reality).

Business 2.0’s Saheli S.R. Datta also put together a thorough review of the Air-Taxi trend in an article this month titled, “Hailing The Air Taxi.”

I’d love to hear from some frequent business travelers about the kind of impact you expect this could have on you personally (So post your comments here). How many of you have already thought about building Air-Taxis into your corporate travel strategy? Are you seeing Air-Taxis as a viable alternative to driving from small city to city and losing time on the road? How much value do you find in the ability to potentially set your own air travel schedule? This is a trend that Mobility Public Relations will be watching as it will undoubtedly have a big impact on the way business travelers think about mobility.