The latest luxury in Florida? A guaranteed private flight out before a hurricane

Florida has a new niche industry to help those who can afford it get out of dodge before a hurricane whirls ashore.

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A newly launched company in Florida proposes a way to avoid getting stuck on the highway or gauged by last-minute commercial or charter flights: you can buy, essentially, an annual hurricane season pass that saves a seat on a private evacuation flight out of Florida.

PriorityEvac launched this summer, and it’s selling seats on planes that would leave from major Florida airports and take evacuees to Atlanta. For $1,250 a year (per person) it’s good for two separate storms in one season. Pets can come for an additional $125.

PriorityEvac’s tagline is “Evacuation, elevated” and a section of its website makes a pitch for selling its product to high net worth, or HNW, individuals. The company lists insurance brokers and agents, residential property management, wealth management and private aviation operators as natural fits for their referral service. Florida has seen an influx of high net worth individuals in the past few years along with services trying to cater to them.

“HNW households ask their broker, advisor, board, or property manager how to evacuate when a storm threatens. The honest answer, until now, has been “we don’t have a good one,” the site says.

Founder Jason Murgio said he considers his product as an affordable alternative to private charter planes, which can “easily run into the low five figures per flight,” for a last-minute self-charter, his site said.

“This would have probably been much easier to do if we aimed for a smaller service on private planes,” he said. “The whole point was to have something that is reasonably priced, and something that many people could use versus something that is very finite and has a very high price point.”

‘There’s gotta be a better way’

The concept came to Murgio after a friend complained about the difficulties and expense of evacuating Florida to New York ahead of a storm. Murgio, a longtime member of the insurance industry, saw a business idea.

“I said to myself, there’s gotta be a better way to do this,” he told the Herald.

South Florida is the first spot he’s launched in, but the goal is to take the service to North Florida and beyond, potentially other Gulf states as well.

PriorityEvac’s pitch is that people can pre-book a seat on a plane leaving from six major coastal airports: Miami International, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood, President Donald J. Trump International (formerly Palm Beach), Tampa International, Sarasota Bradenton International and Southwest Florida International.

When a specific storm threshold is triggered, usually by a tropical storm warning for the region, the company starts scheduling flights and lets each member know what time theirs leaves. That way, they skip the hassle of trying to rent a car, fight through turnpike traffic or snag one of the few seats on a commercial flight out of town.

If a storm doesn’t happen that season, PriorityEvac keeps the $1,250 fee. It’s like paying an annual insurance premium for a one-way plane ticket off the coast.

Murgio said the annual fee is a bargain compared to some of the costs he’s heard of.

Someone at an industry event told him he paid $1,800 for a car service from Miami to Orlando and then $2,000 in last minute air fare to get his college student daughter home to New York ahead of a hurricane. Another said plane tickets out of Tampa ahead of one of the recent hurricanes were $1,400 to $3,000.

Read more The latest luxury in Florida? A guaranteed private flight out before a hurricane

His service assures that paying members have a seat on a large plane reserved solely for PriorityEvac members. It doesn’t come with a flight home, though.

“We are an evacuation business. We are not a travel coordinator,” he said.

Nice to have versus need to have

And while Murgio and his team envision a wide audience of clientele, from students studying away from home, elderly people with advanced medical needs or snowbirds looking for a little reassurance in storm season, this style of evacuation is over and above what evacuation experts typically call for.

When officials call for an evacuation ahead of a hurricane, it’s usually limited to specific geographic zones at the most risk of flooding or high winds. Residents do not generally need to flee their county (or state) when a storm is coming. They may only need to head a few miles inland, away from the deadly wind and storm surge.

“In general, we are not talking about flying to another state; the evacuation itself is mostly by car and to an area that has not been (or will not be) impacted by the hurricane,” said Eren Erman Ozguven, a professor in the department of civil engineering at Florida State University who focuses on evacuation.

Plus, while the opportunity to cross state lines when a storm comes to town might be welcome for plenty of Floridians, it’s financially out of reach for many — at Murgio’s price or the inflated hotel and airline costs that are common ahead of a hurricane.

There’s a difference between a need-to-have and a nice-to-have, though, and both Murgio and Erman Ozguven agree there are good reasons to evacuate further than just a few miles inland.

For one, many counties in Florida at their general population shelters, considered a last resort for fleeing from a storm. That gap widens when you zoom in on the more unique shelters, like pet-friendly ones or shelters geared toward people with special medical needs.

Even for those with cash to spare, plenty of hotels don’t allow pets or can’t guarantee a generator to keep power running for people who need electricity for their medical devices. Plus, it can take days for power to be fully restored in affected communities, even if all the structures survived.

And then there are hurricanes like 2017’s Irma, which carved a line right up the spine of the state and sent people fleeing from all corners of Florida. Erman Ozguven and other researchers analyzed Florida traffic monitoring data and found that residents fled to Georgia and beyond — all the way to the Carolinas and Tennessee.

It was the largest evacuation in modern times, “creating traffic jams along Florida’s evacuation routes that were worse than during any other hurricane in Florida’s history,” their paper found.

“It took at least one to two days for many south Floridian evacuees to reach I-10. Traffic jams and fuel shortages slowed them down, drivers found insufficient fuel at gas stations along crowded evacuation routes, and gridlock prolonged drive times by hours,” he said.

So, it’s not unusual that Floridians with memories of being trapped in a car for 12-plus hours — and the right amount of disposable income — might be intrigued by services like PriorityEvac.

“You don’t have to go to Atlanta, there are other options, but this is really for people who want to have a preparation model that accommodates pets, accommodates family members,” Murgio said.

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“Every person who gets out is less stress on the system.”

This story was originally published July 13, 2026 at 1:31 PM.