The Jet Merchants Launches 'Fly Forward' Recovery Program for OneFlight International Jet Card Holders

Houston-based private aviation advisory firm The Jet Merchants has launched a recovery program called Fly Forward for customers of OneFlight International, the jet card broker that paused flights earlier this month, putting as much as $300 million in prepaid jet card funds at risk. The offer was distributed via email directly through OneFlight to its jet card holders, which The Jet Merchants described as unusual since other recovery offers have come directly from the companies making them. The Jet Merchants characterized its arrangement with Colorado-based OneFlight as a "marketing agreement."

The Jet Merchants was founded in 2024 by Luis Garcia, a longtime private aviation sales executive who spent nine years at charter operator Starbase Jet, joined Wheels Up in 2015, and most recently served as EVP and Head of Sales for Volato before leaving in 2024. The firm is a sister company to Game Day Private Jets, also founded by Garcia, which focuses on crowdsourced shared flights to sporting events. The two companies together employ seven full-time staff.

Fly Forward offers two options. The first lets clients fly on an ad hoc basis without depositing funds. The second requires funding an account with a minimum of $100,000. Both options use fixed hourly rates across light, midsize, super-midsize, and large cabin aircraft categories, derived from an average of more than 125 individual aircraft rates previously offered by OneFlight.

Under the standard, no-deposit option, The Jet Merchants sources flights using dynamic pricing and splits the savings between market cost and the OneFlight category rate with the client. In the example given, a four-hour midsize trip priced at $44,000 under the $11,000-per-hour OneFlight average rate, but sourced at $30,000, produces a $14,000 spread split evenly: the client pays $37,000, and $7,000 is deducted from their outstanding OneFlight balance. Clients who deposit at least $100,000 instead pay a 10% fee on the operator's price; in the same example, the flight would cost $33,000, with $11,000 deducted from the client's OneFlight balance.

Client funds are held in segregated, FDIC-insured accounts in the client's name through a white-label arrangement with Goodwin, a B2B platform connecting operators and charter brokers. Garcia said only the client can move funds from the account. OneFlight members must enroll in Fly Forward by October 31, 2026.

Prepaid jet card models concentrate counterparty risk in the broker holding the deposit, and a pause in flights turns that deposit into a claim rather than a service. When a card program stops operating, cardholders are left negotiating how much of their remaining balance converts into actual flight hours, and the terms of that conversion vary by who structures the recovery offer and how.

The mechanics here illustrate the trade-off directly: the no-deposit option ties any benefit to how much cheaper the sourced flight is than the old OneFlight rate, splitting that spread evenly, while the $100,000-deposit option trades a flat 10% fee for presumably more predictable access. Either way, the value a cardholder recovers depends on the gap between legacy card rates and current charter market pricing, not on the face value of the original deposit. Holding the new funds in segregated, FDIC-insured accounts in the client's name, with only the client able to move them, addresses the specific failure mode that put the original balances at risk.

What happens next hinges on how many of OneFlight's cardholders enroll before the October 31, 2026 deadline, and on whether the outstanding balances tracked through this arrangement are ultimately honored in full as flight credits.