Dubai businessman Kabir Mulchandani offers ₹ 11 Lakh party on his plane. One hotelier wants to end the competition once and for all, so he’s literally taken his brand to the sky. Dubai hotels are constantly competing with one another by raising the bar with their extravagant amenities to stratospheric heights.
The raucous Five Hotels & Resorts will begin taking reservations for its very own 16-passenger private jet on Thursday, promising that the fun will start before you even arrive in Dubai. But only hotel guests can take flights. Anyone can reserve a seat on the plane for a trip lasting up to 12 hours.
Dubai businessman Kabir Mulchandani offers ₹ 11 Lakh party on his plane, look at this:
This isn’t the stuffy corporate jet from Succession where people offer talking points and whisper about backup plans. This aircraft is designed for wild parties and dancing in your seats: The entire cabin can glow purple or any other color you choose thanks to its LED lights. The main cabin’s bedroom, which has a king-sized bed, is hidden behind a door in the back. Passengers are reminded by instructions printed next to it that it can only hold two people at a time and that a “gust belt” is required for use.
“We’ve started thinking of ourselves as an entertainment company,” says Kabir Mulchandani, Five Global Holdings’ chairman and founder, who personally owns the plane. The group’s first hotel, Five Palm Jumeirah, is already known locally as one of the biggest party hotels in the city. It regularly hosts star DJs for beach parties, and guests can drive its supercar right into the hotel’s nightclub for a fee of 10,000 dirhams ($2,723).
Several hotels have their own aircraft, but these are used for logistics, not for having fun: Luxury safari companies in Africa operate fleets of small aircraft to reach extremely remote locations, and some Maldives resorts also fly visitors to nearby islands. The opulent resort Aurora Anguilla owns a jet that it uses to transport guests from South Florida or New York City more quickly and to import supplies to its namesake island, where there are few local shops. Hotels like Aman and Four Seasons have started to offer private jet travel, but these are excursions lasting a few weeks rather than just a means of transportation, with logistics handled by outside operators.
Without accounting for various relocation expenses, flights on the Five Plane will cost between $13,000 and $14,000 per hour of flight time, or about $195,000 for a round trip between London and Dubai. It costs approximately $12,000 per person on a full flight, which is comparable to an Emirates Airlines first-class ticket.
“For the type of aircraft, considering that it has a VIP arrangement inside, I’d say it’s a very good price,” said Dominique Bousquet, team manager at private-jet charter firm Welojets. The cost positions it between an Airbus with a larger cabin-which is offered for $15,000 to $20,000 an hour and a smaller Gulfstream or Bombardier jet offered for $12,000 to $14,000 per hour, said Christopher Marich, co-founder of MySky, a software company for business aviation companies.
The Five brands, which was established in 2017, has recently branched out beyond hotels with the private-jet service. In conjunction with Warner Music Group, the company launched a record label this year and a recording studio at its Five Palm Jumeirah hotel. The next step, according to Mr. Mulchandani, will be a branded yacht for enormous offshore parties. Once more, a distinct atmosphere from the cruises that upscale hotel chains like Ritz-Carlton already offer.
The aircraft, 9H-FIVE, will be flown by Zurich-based Comlux. In the phonetic alphabet used by pilots, the “H” stands for “Hotel.” It is the first new ACJ TwoTwenty aircraft model that Airbus SAS has delivered, and it was flown to Geneva last week to be displayed at the Ebace private jet conference.
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Mr. Mulchandani says he came up with the idea for buying the plane during COVID-19’s lockdown era when he saw demand for private jets boom. “I was flying a lot of that time, talking to people in various terminals,” he says. Once they experienced private aviation, he says, they wouldn’t go back to traveling another way. And that prediction is largely holding up: In the US, the number of private-jet flights dipped by 4.6% in the first quarter, to 1.26 million takeoffs and landings, but bookings are still way above pre-Covid numbers.
When he made the handshake agreement for the purchase in August 2021 and signed the contract a few months later, according to Mr. Mulchandani, he wasn’t anticipating making money on the plane. It served as the brand’s primary marketing tool, according to him. And when it’s not reserved, he and his business can use it. But in some ways, Mr. Mulchandani had good timing: He claims to have secured fuel prices for a period of five years at a discount from the going rate. He refused to say how much he paid for the jet but claims that it has a market value between $80 million and $85 million.
According to Mr. Mulchandani, the aircraft needs to fly 200 hours a year to break even. According to Matteo Atti, chief marketing officer of VistaJet Ltd, a major global aviation charter company, that is less time in the air than most private jets log. The average annual usage of VistaJet’s aircraft is 800 to 1000 hours.
Leisure and party travel is a tiny percentage of the overall demand for private jets, which gives Five a niche, Atti says. “This type of category of planes is trying to address a market that was not explicitly targeted before,” he says. “If they can make a name for themselves as a party plane, I am sure they can get a few flights in.”
Mulchandani has higher goals in mind after this. He intends to eventually take the group into space. After all, travelers who are going to the moon for fun will need a place to stay.
