Photo via BLADE
You may know BLADE as the smartphone application responsible for providing helicopter services from New York City to the Hamptons since last summer. The brainchild of Warner Music COO Rob Wiesenthal, and GroupMe and Splice co-founder Steve Martocci, BLADE has continued to establish itself as an uber-like service for air travel.
The app's latest offering, Bounce, will be in service starting this holiday season (it launched yesterday), enabling clients to get from Manhattan’s heliports (at West 30th Street and East 34th Street) to JFK or Teterboro Airport in under five minutes. Bounce's charters to Teterboro cost $800, and to JFK, $1,250. But that rate remains the same whether it's for one person or six people (maximum).
The booking process doesn't take more than thirty seconds on the free BLADE app, and the company will respond immediately, having a helicopter ready and waiting at the customer's preferred location within twenty minutes. After five minutes of air travel, BLADE provides complimentary transportation to get passengers directly to their terminals upon landing at the airport.
After Bounce launched successfully this Thanksgiving for Teterboro Airport, BLADE general manager Evan Licht decided it was appropriate to make holiday travel easier for JFK-bound passengers too. And in the coming months, they plan to expand this service to other airports in the New York City metropolitan area.
"The trip by car can take anywhere from an hour to two hours as you navigate through construction and fender benders," Evan Licht told ForbesLife. "With Bounce, you are there in less than five minutes. If you bounce to Teterboro you avoid the terminal altogether, and if you bounce to JFK, you actually land in the airport. Bounce simply removes the stress of getting to the airport."
There may not yet truly be an app for everything, but we are getting quite close. Now, there's an app for chartering a flight, and an app for chartering a flight to your flight.
Twitter @RachHen91
