What I Learned From Two Luxurious Hours on a Private Jet

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Last week, I received an invitation to board a free promotional flight organised by a new Uber-like travel app that allows people to book last minute private jets to random locations for a discounted price. Reader, I accepted. Is private jet travel a warped Trumpian metaphor for power and status and the myriad horrors of late capitalism? Yes. Did I want a free ride to Australia's premier winter music festival Splendour in the Grass? Also yes.

It should be noted firstly that the jet I flew on was not, technically, private—in that several other people were also sacrificing their journalistic integrity to be on board, namely two Instagram influencers and a tech journalist from The Australian. Fellow freeloading passengers aside, the whole thing lived up to my previously vague ideas of what luxury air travel might be like.

The decor, in particular. Very nice. Very….Ivanka's weekend shopping getaway to Dubai. Everything was exorbitantly, exaggeratedly luxe; a five-year-old child's idea of what it's like to be rich, although apparently an accurate one. The furnishings featured a lot of polished mahogany and gold accents, and the seats were a soft beige leather of the kind I'd seen frequently in celebrity plane selfies.

At my beck and call was an accommodating personal flight attendant offering a selection of fine cheeses and free-flowing alcoholic beverages served in crystalware. There were expensive skincare products in the bathroom and you had a really nice view of the clouds from a big window while you were peeing. This is how Mariah Carey urinates every day, I couldn't help thinking to myself as I sat contentedly on the leather-covered toilet seat and took a photo of the vista with my iPhone.

How do you make the most of your first—and likely last—private jet experience? You lean in. You go for it. You eat every chocolate-covered peanut, you take every selfie. You frantically upload videos to your various social medias, because it turns out you are allowed to use your mobile on the plane. Naturally, you dress for the occasion—my style references were Fergie in the video for "Glamorous", Kris Jenner, and the rich popular girls who attended my high school.

What I'm saying is that I wore a leopard print coat and palazzo pants. The influencers who, I must say, were not outwardly excited to be there, were just wearing normal clothes. Kind of weird?

Private jet travel, we can all agree, is a thing that looks fun on a Rich Kids of Instagram post but realistically wouldn't be the first or second or tenth thing the average person would spend their lottery winnings on. Still, that aesthetics-driven mentality is important here. Uber-but-for-private-jets apps are marketing themselves to billionaires and CEOs, but also to young people with more limited incomes but extravagant ideas of what a weekend away with some mates should look like. Picture the boys dropping $2k on a weekend in Melbourne to watch the footy and snort cocaine off the kitchen countertop in a Saint Kilda Airbnb. Picture the hen's night of a junior partner at Slater and Gordon.

Airly, the Australian startup that paid for my trip, is following in the footsteps of US apps like Jetsmarter and Privatefly and Blackjet and even Uber itself, which offers occasional jet services in some locations. Over the course of our two hour flight, its co-founder Luke explained how his business model could appeal to young, media-salary earning types such as myself.

"We're looking to cater beyond the one percent," he said as I layered three kinds of cheese onto one water cracker and literally chugged wine. "This is a wild world and we want people to know and experience it."

There's a certain nihilistic side of me that this whole thing appeals to. Like, there's something to be said for feeling so negatively about the future that you're happy to splash about what little disposable cash you have on a lavish trip with friends instead of scraping a pitiful hundred dollars into a savings account each month. While it's a bit of a leap to put private jets in the same category as tried-and-true twenty-something coping mechanisms like smashed avocado breakfasts and ride shares and after work pints, you can see how using the "millennial" buzzword helped get the investors on board. We are sad and looking for distractions, as a general rule.

As far as luxury travel experiences go, this one made me feel like a powerful if inept Kardashian and earned me exactly three (3) new Instagram followers within 24 hours. In a world where the publicly broadcasted lives of the rich and famous and influential taunt us every day, two hours inside of an ostentatiously furnished aeroplane filled with non-supermarket cheese felt wonderfully surreal. As the jet touched down smoothly in Brisbane, I sensed a sudden kinship with Elon Musk. Poor people should work harder, I thought to myself. I should tell my PA that it's better when the supermodels don't speak English.

After drinking enough chardonnay to stifle the voice of my inner socialist, I'd had some profound revelations about the future of app-sourced air travel. Private jet flights are absolutely the new Uber, especially if they are given to you for free but otherwise perhaps if you have $1000 to spare and no longer give a single fuck about anything.

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