To win business travelers, airlines rush to Silicon Valley

Photo: Photo: Courtesy Of Jet Suite JetSuite, a private-jet company, will debut its “tech charter”...

When Virgin America was founded in 2007, the Burlingame company worked hard to pitch itself as the unofficial airline of Silicon Valley.

Richard Branson, the British billionaire entrepreneur, was among its original backers. The aircraft featured a sleek design, power outlets and high-speed Internet, so business travelers could get some work done while flying to other tech hotspots like Denver and Los Angeles.

“It was very easy to tell that we were the preferred airline (for Silicon Valley) because we were the only ones at the time who had fleet-wide Wi-Fi,” CEO David Cush told me this year. “That was the big differentiator we had early. The Silicon Valley population not only likes the product but the fact that we don’t sit back, and keep pushing the envelope with new innovations.”

Virgin America has since agreed to be bought by Alaska Airlines. But Cush’s strategy to tie its brand to Silicon Valley may survive intact.

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Alaska Airlines, based in Seattle, has recently started nonstop flights connecting San Jose to Los Angeles, New York and San Diego. The company said the New York route in particular was “highly requested” by Silicon Valley business and leisure travelers. After the acquisition, Alaska might even keep the Virgin America name, given its close ties to Silicon Valley.

“The merger is not yet officially complete,” spokeswoman Ann Zaninovich said in an email. “Until that point, we are operating as two separate airlines. A decision has not been made about the brand.”

Other air-travel companies are also eager to court the region’s high fliers. JetSuite, an Irvine private-jet company, will introduce its “tech charter” service from San Jose to Los Angeles on Monday. It will presumably compete with Surf Air, a membership airline that also offers daily service between the two cities. JetBlue has gotten creative too: In addition to regular San Jose flights, the airline this year established a venture capital unit in Redwood City.

The rush to Silicon Valley is not surprising. The tech industry and the regional economy continue to thrive, which means more demand for airline service, especially short-haul and regional business travel between various tech hubs. The region’s tech companies spend more than $1 billion per year on travel, according to the local chapter of the Global Business Travel Association.

“It’s where the high-revenue passengers are,” said Michael Boyd, president of Boyd Group International consulting firm. “There is a lot of high-tech travel, and for airlines, business travel is the name of the game. Silicon Valley is a destination unto itself. You name the airline and business model, and it’s there.”

JetSuite CEO Alex Wilcox said some business passengers were already paying the company $5,000 each way for super-premium charter service. To attract a broader group of business and leisure travelers, JetSuite decided to offer the San Jose to Los Angeles route starting at $129 one way.

“Compared to other parts of the country, California is booming,” Wilcox said. “We want the business traveler who needs to buy a ticket at the last minute.”

Trips of up to 500 miles, such as those within California, account for more than a third of all flights in the United States, according to a report by the Brookings Institution in Washington. Three of the busiest routes originate from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Phoenix and Las Vegas.

JetSuite specifically chose San Jose because the location offers better weather, fewer flights and potentially not as many delays compared with San Francisco International Airport, Wilcox said.

But San Jose is growing rapidly, too. Last year, 4.81 million passengers boarded planes at San Jose, a 19 percent jump from 2010, according to data from the Federal Aviation Administration.

JetSuite certainly is not immune to delays. The Chronicle was supposed to take photos of a JetSuite flight arriving in San Jose from Bozeman, Mont., on Thursday at 4:30 p.m.

We eventually gave up after the airline pushed the arrival time to 9:45.

Thomas Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: tlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByTomLee