Can Kenny Dichter’s Real Jet Boost Crypto Payments For Private Flights?

After making a market for jet cards with Marquis Jet in 2001 and then popularizing turboprops for private flyers in 2013 with Wheels Up, Real Jet Chairman Kenny Dichter is hoping to make paying for your private jet charters with cryptocurrency a thing. This morning Real Jet announced a partnership with Crypto.com

Real SLX

Forbes currently tracks 18,137 cryptocurrencies with a combined market cap of $2.29 trillion. Can the digital currency become a mainstream form of payment for private jet charters? While private jet charter companies that have been accepting crypto payments for years say it has yet to take off, Kenny Dichter sees blue skies. This morning, the founder and chairman of Real Jet announced a partnership with Crypto.com.

Dichter’s marketing savvy helped make jet cards a thing back in 2001 when he launched Marquis Jet in partnership with NetJets. Despite naysayers, there are now around 100 companies in the U.S. that sell private flight memberships. In 2013, he popularized turboprops as a replacement for long car drives, positioning the King Air as an SUV in the sky when he launched Wheels Up, a company he grew to over $1.5 billion in revenue. Now Dichter believes his alliance with Crypto.com will both expand the market by bringing new customers to private aviation and increase the use of cryptocurrency as a form of payment.

Dichter says, “We didn’t know (in 2001) how important the advent of the fractional jet card and jet cards in general would be as an entry point to the private aviation industry, bringing tens of thousands of new customers and tens of billions of new incremental dollars to the market.”

Crypto.com Chief Business Officer Joe Anzures says, “Partnering with Real Jet is a milestone for Crypto.com and our Crypto.com Pay feature, which was designed for ease of use and seamless integration,” adding, “We are proud to support Real Jet as it embraces the crypto payments space.” Real Jet is the first private aviation company on the platform.

Crypto.com has over 150 million users in 90 countries and earlier this year attracted a $400 million investment from Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities, valuing the 2016 start-up at $20 billion.

Of course, only a sliver of users have the wealth to fly privately. Still, it’s not a small number. Motley Fool reports that 4.7 million individuals in the U.S. with a net worth of more than $1 million hold cryptocurrency while various estimates peg the market for private flyers at less than 150,000.

Jet cards, which typically guarantee both a contracted rate and availability, are popular because they reduce booking a private jet to a single call, click or text. Dichter says aligning with Crypto.com similarly reduces friction, with Crypto.com Pay integrated into the checkout process.

The Crypto.com partnership with Real Jet follows an alliance with Dichter’s Real SLX, a VIP experience and events company.

Dichter says besides speed, benefits include secure transactions and compliance with regulatory standards. The integrated payment process, for now, is available to U.S. residents, and transactions are settled in U.S. dollars.

Dichter says, “In 2001, we created the fractional jet card, making private aviation accessible to a much wider audience. Crypto.com Pay is the next leap forward…This generation transacts the way they live: instant, digital, and frictionless.”

Multiple private jet companies already accept cryptocurrency as payment.

Bitlux CEO Kyle Patel, who founded the Florida-based charter broker in 2018, says, “Adoption picked up in 2019, and by 2020 it was already shaping how clients paid us. In 2022 and 2023 it was the majority rail: more than half of our flights and client base transacted in crypto.” Patel says in 2006, 30% of on-demand charter flights and 44% of revenue are paid in cryptocurrency.

Hera Flight marketing executive Meg Palumbo says for the charter operator, “We think it’s a smart move for the industry. Crypto-native buyers are a real and growing segment of private aviation clients, and any deal that makes payment easier for them is good for the market overall…Demand is trending up, and we expect meaningful growth over the next 12 months.”

Others say the segment is growing but remains very small, subject to market ups and downs.

Monarch Air Group has been accepting crypto payments since 2017. CEO David Gitman says, “We are happy to see other providers catching up. Crypto payments grow in the high double digits year over year, but so is the company overall.” He notes, “We do see significant spikes in crypto payments whenever crypto itself spikes, most notably last summer, when Bitcoin topped $100,000,” adding, “Crypto as a method of payment for private jet charter is very low now, as the crypto market is low.”

Paramount Business Jets CEO Richard Zaher says, “We have accepted a broad range of leading cryptocurrencies for the past year. Crypto currently accounts for approximately 1% of our total sales, with our most recent transaction completed in early February.” He says, “We have not received another request to pay with crypto during the past six months.” Like Gitman, Zaher says, “Demand remains closely tied to market conditions. When crypto valuations decline, holders tend to preserve their digital assets rather than use them to pay for private jet travel.” He notes, “Crypto is therefore a valuable payment option, but at this stage, it remains a complementary payment method rather than a replacement for traditional channels.”

Others are less optimistic.

Outlier Jets CEO Michael Farley says, “We started taking crypto in August 2021 and you could use it for anything we provide, a charter leg, the Outlier Jet Card, or (buying an) entire airplane. Five years in, we’ve only done a handful of deals.” Farley says it’s unrealistic to tie using cryptocurrency to pay for private jet flights to the size of the crypto market. He says, “I own crypto myself. A lot of our members own it.” However, they view it as an investment instead of a form of payment and are unlikely to use crypto to pay for charter flights any more than they would sell shares in a stock. “It is worth asking me again in five years. Owning it and spending it aren’t the same thing.”

Former telecom executive and BC Flight CEO Thane Namy believes, “Cryptocurrency does have a place as a form of payment…Coming from a technology background, I don’t have any major concerns about accepting cryptocurrency. There are multiple factors that a business accepting crypto has to deal with, but that’s more of an internal business issue than a concern for our clients.” Namy says, “I think despite the additional complexities, it will slowly become part of business and a legitimate payment method,” adding, “I would consider working with Crypto.com, but we have so few clients interested in paying with crypto that it hasn’t been a significant focus.”

Mike Winston launched Jet Token in 2021 (before rebranding as Jet AI) and hoped to ride the ascent of cryptocurrency. Winston says, “Accepting crypto payments is kind of a nothingburger,” adding, “There’s very little adoption. It was and remains a tiny percentage of our revenue.” Like Farley, he says, “In our experience, people tend to look at crypto really as a speculative investment, not as a medium of exchange, especially when it comes to private aviation.”

While an advocate of crypto payments, Patel of Bitlux says, “When a platform like Crypto.com Pay sits between buyer and seller, that’s arguably just a new middleman with its own KYC bolted on…Clients store crypto in all kinds of ways, and that diversity is the point — routing everything through one centralized exchange cuts against it.”

Still, Patel adds, “Crypto’s speed and optionality are real.” He points to the outbreak of the U.S./Iran war when airlines stopped flying to places like Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Accepting digital payments enabled Bitlux to successfully arrange and get paid for charter flights as ex-pats sought private jet charters.

For his part, Dichter says, “Crypto in not a fad. It’s a trend. This is not an either-or situation.” Real Jet, he notes, continues to take wires, ACH payments, checks, credit cards, and money orders.

Dichter says, “What we are doing is making it much simpler and easier to use cryptocurrency to pay for private flights. Rome wasn’t built in a day…but if you don’t start building, you are going to find yourself sitting on an empty runway.”

(Note: An earlier version contained an incorrect reference. Citadel Securities invested in Crypto.com.)