It’s pretty normal for sports teams to charter planes to fly them around during their seasons. This isn’t necessarily a luxury thing, but rather a cost and schedule thing, given how many people they’re transporting. Chartering a jet isn’t that prohibitively expensive when you’re transporting dozens and dozens of people.
Continue reading: Jealous: A Sports Team Chartered The Crystal 777 To Take Them To China
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Saw this plane fly over anchorage on Sunday. Googled it and realized it was a thing. Thanks for the follow up.
Your comment about the seating,
"The part of the cabin with standard seats doesn’t look that exceptional. Actually, it looks subpar for business class nowadays, as there’s not direct aisle access from every seat"
I would think this aircraft is set up for couples traveling together. Single seats by the windows for direct aisle access would not work for that. I doubt that many business travelers are using this aircraft.
dk, maybe you could have finished reading the paragraph. He goes on to say:
"Then again, given that it will mostly be couples traveling together, I guess that sort of makes sense."
That Anders guy should have his account suspended until he is able to post pictures that isnt just a blur. I've seen monkies (literally) take better pictures than that.
Btw, the plane looks awesome.
I read that Crystal has decided to suspend their tour business with this plane and is hoping to just charter it out to groups like this in the future.
If anyone is interested, here's a brochure for their package tours (scroll down on the page): https://www.crystalcruises.com/StaticPages/aircruises-asia/en/index.html
Basically a one-week trip from HKG to Fiji and Tahiti costs $18,000, including air fare, hotels, meals, etc. As a point of comparison, Four Seasons private jet is charging $135,000 for a 3 week journey. Hmmm....
@ usr22 -- Interesting, it's actually not as expensive as I was expecting. However, I'm a bit surprised they don't share what hotels you'll stay at. Simply describing it as a "luxury hotel" seems odd at this price point.
@USR22, I think you've got Ben thinking about doing this! That could be a great honeymoon, although the other travelers might be rich retired folks in their 70's. I don't suppose there's any way to book these tours with points?
@Charlie McMillan - An odd tip I remember reading once is that when booking a cruise, always look at the company's marketing materials for clues as to the age (and income level) of the customers they expect on a particular cruise. The models I found on the Crystal page for this 777 "aircruise" service are not in their 70s; they're quite young (20s-30s). Also, it's interesting that the trips depart from Hong Kong, and information is available in two Asian languages (I'm guessing Mandarin and Cantonese?). So they are targeting nouveau riche Chinese and their families. That demographic I think skews to middle age and younger.
@snic - Those are "Traditional Chinese" and "Simplified Chinese". Traditional Chinese is used by Taiwanese People and people from Hong Kong, while most other Chinese people(Malaysia, Singapore...) use simplified version. There is no written characters for Cantonese since it is a dialect of Chinese.
As a point of comparison, Four Seasons private jet is charging $135,000 for a 3 week journey.
Well, that's because the FS PJ trip goes around the world and it's not just a HKG to Fiji or Tahiti charter.
We recently got off a Crystal Alaska cruise. My third time and my finance's first. Fabulous!. I can't wait to travel on their 777.
@lucky - I agree, it's not as expensive as I expected. Regarding the "luxury hotel" wording - I did a bit of a research by searching their Chinese name on Google, and according to this page on a Taiwanese travel agency ( https://www.liontravel.com/webpd/webpdsh00.aspx?sKind=1&sProd=SITCRYS001, page in Chinese only), their planned hotel at Bora Bora seems to be Conrad, and Le Meridian and Intercontinental in Tahiti. It's also interesting to see that they originally planned this to be a HKG-Kenya-Tahiti trip.
But hey, just as @Charlie suggested, maybe you should try one for the team!
@askmrlee - True, but the crystal one charges $18,000 for one week of traveling, and four seasons is essentially charing 7x more for a time period 3x longer. I do think that the four seasons one include a lot more flying than simply a charter from HKG to South Pacific, but they are flying a 757 (instead of a 777) and I would imagine that they can get deep discounted rates for all the four season hotels they are staying. Just my 2 cents.
Did Ford make a big commission?
For 50k/hour + ferry fees, its too bad there are no showers for the post-game flight home.
Next time, fly Emirates.
@Eric- There are written characters for Cantonese, and some of them are used even if writing in a formal style as Cantonese retained the use of some of the vocabulary from Classical Chinese, which are not used in other dialects such as Mandarin.