New air service evacuates residents ahead of hurricanes

As the region settles into hurricane season with its threats of evacuations and people leaving the coast, there is one set of residents who, for $1,250, no longer need to worry about clogged highways.

These are the people who have paid the annual fee to sign up for a membership with a West Palm Beach air service company that launched earlier this month named PriorityEvac. As its name implies, the company's sole objective is to get its clients on flights and out of town ahead of a storm and away from the teeming masses in packed cars and highways. While its headquarters is based on the state's east coast, three of the largest airports on the state's west coast, in Tampa, Fort Myers and Sarasota-Bradenton, are on PriorityEvac's get-out-of-town-fast list.

The idea for the business came to founder Jason Murgio, a former insurance executive and entrepreneur, around 2019 when talking to friends who’d dealt with nothing but chaos when trying to evacuate as a hurricane approached.

As Murgio tells it, the friends, a family of four, were flying commercial and had an awful time finding seats. And when they did find seats, the cost for last minute flights mounted into the thousands of dollars.

“They were sitting there telling me the story and I said, ‘there’s got to be a better way,’” he says.

Murgio spent the next several years trying to find that better way.

The idea he had was to create an air service that would shuttle people from select airports as a storm approached and evacuations became mandatory. 

The main objective was to find chartered planes commercially configured to fly large groups of people out at one time, he says. “If you can't do this at any scale, what's the point?”

Time it right

To solve that problem, PriorityEvac is working with Global Crossing Airlines out of Miami. The airline owns a family of more than 20 A320 aircrafts that seat 180. This allows PriorityEvac to move large groups at once with the planes able to make multiple trips.

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PriorityEvac has put the airline on retainer so it can use its services when the time comes, Murgio says.

Another major priority was coming up with a reliable model for when to begin evacuations.

If you do it to soon, a storm could pass or shift. That wastes resources — and money. If you wait too long, airports could close down.

To work on that end, Murgio brought on Wallace Barnes, who spent 18 years as a lead forecaster at the National Hurricane Center as chief meteorologist and Tim Houston, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who coordinated multiple Florida hurricane evacuations as chief operating officer.

They helped “to develop the trigger” for when to start evacuations.

The company also worked with Project Dynamo, a disaster response nonprofit, to build out the case management system, logistics and the communications. It also helps with operations when evacuations are needed.

Hedge factor

As for the price point, Murgio turned to 27 years of experience in the insurance business to come up with the price.

“I went in and said, ‘Okay, let's look at storm probabilities and paths,’” says Murgio, who, as an insurance investment banker, closed more than 200 transactions, including deals for insurance carriers, managing general agencies, wholesale brokers and retail agencies, according to his LinkedIn page. 

“When you buy your homeowner's insurance, you're paying for hurricane coverage (but a) storm doesn't happen every year. So, what's the probability? What we did was re-engineer that actuarial piece to figure out how we could price this at an affordable level, and that’s how we came to the $1,250.”

While the annual fee doesn’t appear that high, a person who is evacuated will be flown to Atlanta where they are responsible for their own lodging and their own way back to Florida.

Murgio, who wouldn’t share revenue projections or startup investments, says the price point makes the membership affordable for the middle market customer.

But at that price point, $1,250 per person per year, for it to be economically feasible for the company there needs to be both a large number of members and not too many storms.

Ever the industry professional, Murgio and PriorityEvac bought corporate insurance in the event there is too few of the former and too many of the latter. “It is effectively hedging the costs using insurance,” he says.

PriorityEvac put out its first social media post in June and began its push to get the word out immediately after July 4.

For now, the service covers 12 Florida counties (the eight coastal counties between Pasco to Collier are among those) and will fly out of six state airports, including Tampa International Airport, Sarasota Bradenton International Airport and Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers.

While Murgio says initial membership numbers weren’t available yet, PriorityEvac has the capacity to get to 5,000 members in Florida the first year and to scale that to more than 10,000 after that.

And while geographically, and because of its penchant to get hit by hurricanes, Florida is the ideal place to start, there are plans to expand the service. That will be to areas prone to storms but could sometime in the future include areas dealing with disasters like wildfires.