Industry leaders and the ultra-wealthy constantly rely on private charter planes for business and pleasure alike. What happens when this matter of luxury and convenience becomes a hinderance and detrimentally affects the client’s day, week or even month?
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Earlier this year, an example of this nightmare situation occurred at the hands of Alliance Aviation Group, a prominent luxury jet charter company.
Loren Ridinger, co-founder and CEO of Market America | SHOP.COM, went through a disappointing instance where Alliance, also known as Fly Alliance, had the opportunity to demonstrate honest human empathy. Instead, the charter company deceived Mrs. Ridinger and has failed to stand up to basic business principles.
Ridinger is an extremely influential and well-connected industry titan who frequently relies on dependable and consistent service for her private charters. Market America | SHOP.COM is a leading e-commerce, and digital marketing company. Unfortunately, Loren recently had her world turned upside down when her husband, JR Ridinger passed away. JR touched a countless amount of lives throughout his career as Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Market America | SHOP.COM and left a lasting legacy. Some of the figures JR and Loren mentored and heavily influenced included Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, Jamie Foxx, Fat Joe, Kamal Hotchandani among many more.
On August 13, 2022, the client entered into agreement with Alliance for a private chartered one-way flight from White Plains, NY to Dubrovnik, Croatia on August 22 at 8pm for a price of $150k.
The confusion began immediately. The originally quoted aircraft was a Gulfstream G-V, to which Mrs. Ridinger was not given a tail number. This aircraft was changed on the same day, August 13th, to a Bombardier Global Express, tail N599SR. On August 21st, Alliance changed the plane again without telling Mrs. Ridinger. This time the tail number was listed as N44WG.
On the day of the scheduled flight, August 22nd, the flight was delayed for nearly an hour, allegedly due to inclement weather. FAA records show no mention of weather at the corresponding time of flight. The reason for the delay was later reported by Alliance to be caused by a screen malfunction, and the back-up flight computer had to be replaced.
About two hours past the originally planned time of departure, Mrs. Ridinger was informed by the pilot that the maintenance technician had signed off and they were “good to go.” After Mrs. Ridinger and her party were seated aboard the plane for 15 minutes, the Captain informed them that the operator pulled the plane and they were no longer agreeing to man the flight. The parties were told that Don Mills, Alliance’s Assistant Director of Operations, was the person on the phone who, from an office in Texas, overruled the on-site maintenance technician who had cleared the aircraft for takeoff.
Mrs. Ridinger was confused about the back-and-forth so she decided to try to get some sort of understanding of the situation. The first person available was an airport employee at the hangar. According to Mrs. Ridinger, this person expressed just as much confusion as she did. The airport employee told Mrs. Ridinger that a hired technician had already cleared the plane to fly.
These delays had severe consequences to a highly-anticipated trip. The passengers were forced to miss two full days on their scheduled yacht charter in Croatia; a charter for which they paid approximately $350k for seven days.
Throughout the evening (between midnight and approximately 1am on August 23rd), knowing that it was not going to be able to deliver on its promises, Alliance’s President and Co-Founder, Christopher Tasca, offered to give the Plaintiff a full refund at least six times, even going so far to admit that the company did not have sufficient experience with global travel. At 6am, the promised time for a solution, Mr. Tasca was unresponsive. At 7:03am he said he was gathering updates and will advise in 15 minutes. At 7:25am, Tasca informed his clients that the only option is 8pm out of White Plains. Alliance continued to work to try to move the time up. At 9:38am, they offered a departure for 4:30pm.
At this point, the passengers had no confidence that Alliance would deliver on the 4:30pm flight, or that it could do so safely. Shockingly, the passengers were made aware that the pilots were not qualified to fly the Gulfstream aircrafts in the first place. They asked Alliance for the refund that it had previously offered several times. Suddenly, however, Alliance wrongfully refused to provide it to them.
It seems this is not the first time that clients have had subpar experience with Alliance in their charter experience. Earlier this year, another luxury traveler, William, wrote a review on the Better Business Bureau website stating that, “Alliance Aviation does not run an honest operation. They do not honor their agreements, constantly rescind what is agreed and are extremely rude and difficult to work with. I could provide several instances supporting my claim… I have since talked with others who have had unsatisfactory dealings with Alliance Aviation.”
These are examples of how a prominent luxury charter jet company such as Alliance Aviation Group, can abuse their position of power with clients who pay a premium for this service. The consequences of this poor service can result in severe financial loss, logistic nightmares or worse.
A comprehensive summary of this unfortunate incident can be viewed HERE.
