Are you a corporation with a private jet you hardly use? A business that sometimes could use a private jet, but sometimes just needs seats on a commercial plane?
Wheels Up wants to talk.
The Atlanta-based private jet company says its partnership with Delta Air Lines offers something new. And although it hasn’t turned a profit since going public in 2021, Wheels Up argues its turnaround strategy is beginning to pay off.
A “linchpin” to that partnership, CEO George Mattson said in an interview, is its corporate sales strategy.
Before Delta’s involvement in 2019, Wheels Up had been more narrowly focused on leisure travel. Now, corporate sales represent its fastest growing segment and half its membership sales, Mattson said. The company hit a quarterly corporate sales record late last year.
Despite that, Wheels Up posted a nearly $340 million loss in 2024 and was about $260 million in the red during the first nine months of 2025.
It was twice in 2025 deemed noncompliant by the New York Stock Exchange because its share price remained below $1 for too long. It has until June to regain compliance.
Wheels Up underwent a round of layoffs last fall, which Mattson called “adjustments” largely affecting underused maintenance bases and pilots. Last month it announced plans to sell and lease back 10 planes to pay down debt and raise cash.
But Mattson says the corporate sales strategy is “critically important” to what Wheels Up and Delta are planning in the years ahead: connecting commercial and private aviation travel in a way that has never been done before.
He also predicts the company will soon start to reap the financial benefits of its expensive, ongoing fleet modernization plan.
For Delta, there are big hopes in this partnership, too. It owns a 38% stake.
“We got some work to do, but eventually it’s going to be our next step on our premium ladder,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian told investors of the plans in 2024.
“No airline has ever been able to integrate commercial with a private opportunity. We have Delta people inside Wheels Up on loan, and learning about the business, and how we can schedule it, how we can price it, how we can operationalize it.”
The partnership offers advantages for both, said Adam Cowburn, managing director at Alton Aviation Consultancy specializing in business aviation. Wheels Up brings an even larger premium customer base to Delta, he said.
Meanwhile, Wheels Up gets the benefit of Delta’s balance sheet, he said, “and being able to access capital in a way that they probably wouldn’t otherwise” in a competitive and volatile industry littered with failed ventures.
The business aviation industry is “structurally oversupplied with aircraft,” he said, and very sensitive to economic downturns.
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
A mini Delta
In 2024, Wheels Up moved its headquarters from New York to Georgia, where it employs about 200 of its 1,600 global workforce.
A walk around its Chamblee home near DeKalb-Peachtree Airport quickly reveals why.
As Bastian referenced, there many Delta-badged employees present, on loan to Wheels Up.
The building also houses a “Network Operations Center” responsible for coordinating and dispatching Wheels Up flights that is physically modeled after Delta’s and run by a Delta operations veteran.
“We’ve seen a very significant improvement in operational performance,” Mattson said, “and we followed the Delta playbook to do it.”
In 2019 Delta combined Wheels Up with its own former Delta Private Jets subsidiary, but Wheels Up faltered during COVID-19.
The airline led a $500 million bailout for the private jet company; its CFO, Dan Janki, joined Wheels Up’s board, and Mattson left Delta’s board to take the helm in 2023.
Two years later, the partnership is becoming increasingly visible to customers.
The two companies’ sales teams already work from the same locations in New York, Miami and Los Angeles, Mattson said.
Wheels Up offers a membership program through its more than 100 owned and leased aircraft, as well as a global charter network.
The joint vision with Delta is to allow customers who might want to move back and forth between private and commercial aviation to do so seamlessly.
That sometimes means convincing corporate customers that it could make sense to trade in their own jet for a Delta/Wheels Up account.
“There’s an increasing desire by companies to have both the convenience benefits of being able to fly privately when they need to for business, combined with doing so fiscally responsibly and efficiently,” he said.
“We have had a lot of early success talking with companies that either own their own corporate fleets (or) realize that’s probably not the optimal solution by itself.”
Seventy percent of all private aviation aircraft are wholly owned, mostly by individual corporations, he said, but those represent only 40% of total private jet flying hours.
Those planes aren’t being used efficiently, Mattson argued.
Wheels Up offerings are different from the standard fractional jet membership model, he said, which requires a customer to commit to a certain number of hours on a kind of jet over a set period.
“No one travels that way,” he said.
The idea is to offer “a toolbox of aviation solutions. … You decide how you fly, not every trip, not for years in the same airplane, but trip by trip.”
The vision
Doug Gollan, president and CEO of Private Jet Card Comparisons, a buyer’s guide to private aviation services, said about 90% of his subscribers also use scheduled airlines, and he sees the opportunity for Wheels Up and Delta.
“Maybe you flew Delta out to Los Angeles. You had a couple meetings, but then you want to go to three cities … and you’ll do that on Wheels Up in one or two days instead of a (commercial) trip that would take you four days,” Gollan said.
Two key statistics for Mattson on this subject? Delta has roughly 45,000 corporate customers, while Wheels Up has just under 10,000 active users.
“And so you get a sense of the scale here, right?” he said.
For Delta, he said, this is an opportunity to capture “more premium aviation dollars with those customers.”
It allows the airline to extend its offerings past first class and extend its geographic reach beyond commercial airports, he said.
Sales teams are beginning to approach Delta corporate customers with an additional “sleeve” to use Wheels Up services at no extra cost.
Wheels Up spending already counts toward Delta loyalty status.
And starting this month, Wheels Up members will be able to book Delta commercial flights with their membership funds through the private jet company’s portal.
Someday, the vision is to allow the reverse, too: a customer in a Delta app able to consider a private jet option as a premium level above international first class, Mattson said.
“That’s all a little bit further out in the future, but that’s clearly where we’re all looking to go,” he said.
All eyes are on Wheels Up’s financials to see if and when it starts to improve, Gollan said.
But maybe for its key backer, Wheels Up could be a win by just breaking even or “not losing a lot of money, because they’re bringing something to the mother ship, Delta,” he said.
Just like not all routes from an airline hub need to be profitable if they can “really develop synergy,” if the Wheels Up relationship helps Delta grow its corporate accounts, that could be enough, Gollan suggested.
Credit: Kelly Yamanouchi
Credit: Kelly Yamanouchi
Not a new idea
Combining commercial and private aviation service isn’t a new idea, Gollan noted, but “nobody has been able to do it.”
Although Qatar Airways is one airline with a private aviation division, he said, the industry is riddled with past failed attempts.
United tried to launch fractional jet company Avolar in 2001, he said, but that was shelved after 9/11 and union pushback.
FlexJet, a now-independent private jet company, started as a partnership with American Airlines in the 1990s. Lufthansa halted its private jet service in 2022, Gollan previously reported.
A true partnership hasn’t yet succeeded, in part, he argues, because airlines’ labor unions often oppose it, seeing it as “competition.”
Notably, Delta stands alone among its competitors with 20% of its workforce unionized, compared with more than 80% among its peers.
“Historically, no one’s ever made a wild success of it,” Cowburn agreed. “It’s never been a slam dunk for anyone.”
The business models, aircraft types and pilots are different. It’s much more expensive to fly private, he noted.
“It’s air travel, but really quite different,” he said of the two industries.
That being said, the Wheels Up/Delta model has a “logic to it.”
They are trying to “thread a needle,” he said, to market to people in the middle with an “occasional” private jet need. And those people exist, he said.
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