Danbury air taxi provider to add flights, lower costs

Kavoo, a Danbury-based air taxi provider that was recently acquired by Georgia-based ImagineAir Jet Services L.L.C., plans to increase its number of private flights this summer.

Together, Kavoo and ImagineAir have 11 private flights and will add four more by late summer. With the acquisition, Kavoo, which charters private flights throughout the Northeast, now offers online booking to places in the Southeast through ImagineAir’s reservation system.

“Before, customers would inquire about private flights through our website or call us, and it would sometimes take an hour to work out a quote,” said Richard Humphrey, chairman of ImagineAir and former Kavoo CEO. “We brought in this modern internal reservation system, which actually makes immediate transactions when customers are ready to get that done.”

Kavoo, which coordinates about 1,000 private flights annually, is now expected to increase that number to 4,000 through ImagineAir’s leadership, Humphrey said.

With the acquisition, ImagineAir can now expand its air taxi pickup and drop-off destinations to commercial airports throughout the Northeast. The company plans to add new service routes to Washington, D.C., for business travelers making day trips.

Within the past few weeks, Kavoo”™s air taxis have been rebranded with ImagineAir”™s logo. The pricing structure will also change, decreasing flight costs by 30 percent, said Haroon Qureshi, director of marketing and sales at ImagineAir.

“We used to charge a higher hourly rate to cover the cost of the plane dropping off customers and leaving with no passengers,” Qureshi, said. “Now, we have optimized our systems, and we can pair up one-way flights with other one-way flights, so planes don”™t fly around empty as much. With those cost savings, we”™re able to pass it on to customers.”

For over a decade, NASA had invested $70 million in programs to revive general aviation across the nation. Its Small Aircraft Transportation System program aimed to move travelers from highways and commercial airline hubs to thousands of underutilized airports nationwide. Kavoo and ImagineAir share in that vision by providing private travel to a much broader marketplace by making their prices more cost-efficient and travel less time-consuming.

“The way we describe it is, we’re providing private travel for people who aren’t billionaires yet,” Humphrey said. “Before, private travel was exclusive to the super elite. Our goal is to get this down to very low price points, so it”™s affordable to most travelers. Our intention is to roll this out nationally and have about 200 airplanes covering the U.S. within five years.”

Kavoo plans to maintain an office in White Plains, N.Y., and a maintenance center in Danbury.