The Brand Law Firm Located in Orlando, Florida will be filing a lawsuit against Fly Clear and Verified Identity Pass, Inc. on behalf of consumers that have purchased ?Clear Card? services from Fly Clear. Clear Card is a service sold to travelers that expedites the security screening process at airports, and costs approximately $199 per year. Clear Card was in use at airports such as Albany, Denver, San Francisco, and Orlando International Airport. According to its website, Fly Clear has ceased its operations as of June 22, 2009, and its Clear Lanes are no longer available. According to the Clear Card website, Fly Clear will not issue refunds to consumers.

If you have purchased a subscription to Fly Clear?s Clear Card services, please contact the attorneys at 877-407-Brand or fill out the contact form on http://www.flyclearclassaction.com

The Brand Law Firm Located in Orlando, Florida will be filing a lawsuit against Fly Clear and Verified Identity Pass, Inc. on behalf of consumers that have purchased “Clear Card” services from Fly Clear. Clear Card is a service sold to travelers that expedites the security screening process at airports, and costs approximately $199 per year. Clear Card was in use at airports such as Albany, Denver, San Francisco, and Orlando International Airport. According to its website, Fly Clear has ceased its operations as of June 22, 2009, and its Clear Lanes are no longer available. According to the Clear Card website, Fly Clear will not issue refunds to consumers.

If you have purchased a subscription to Fly Clear’s Clear Card services, please contact the attorneys at 877-407-Brand or fill out the contact form on http://www.flyclearclassaction.com

Great comment.

I also found that Clear made traveling with a child much easier, for reasons you may not expect and that the family lane wouldn't help: http://www.thebentleys.com/blog/2009_04.html

I just re-upped with Clear in April. Sigh. If their subscriber and RPU numbers are accurate, I too wonder where all the money went.

My initial suspicion was that they were playing hardball with creditors and operations will resume. I can't imagine there are any other assets there other than the cash flow from operations. I can, however, clearly picture the following conversation:
Creditor: we're not giving up any of our preferences
Company: you have to, everyone else is, and we can't raise more cash unless you do
Creditor: don't care, we're not budging
Company: … okay, here are the keys. Good luck. You have preferences on a bunch of biometric machines and red ropes.
Creditor: … wait, uh … come back?

It seems, however, that this kind of announcement would go a long way to killing sales. They'd need a huge PR budget to come back after this.

From the cash burn perspective I'd bet that the vast majority of their subscribers never paid anywhere close to full price to sign up. Everyone I know who had a card got it from being top tier elite at a hotel program. And I cannot imagine that Hyatt, Starwood and Marriott paid full price to buy in bulk like that. On the cost side of the equation they had to staff 3-5 people at a bunch of airports and invest in cool technology like retinal scanners. That costs a bit. But I'm betting the real cash sink was from renting space at the airports. Getting the floor space to set up operations can be very expensive.

That, or they were paying bribes to the TSA.

As for real benefits in terms of walking to the front of the line, I guess there was some value for some people some of the time, but people who traveled frequently generally have a similar enough benefit through their status at most airports. There certainly wasn't the incremental value in it from my perspective, particularlty with their record for maintaining the security of personal data.

The concept of paying extra and providing an incredible amount of personal information simply to walk to the front of the line where you received the same groping and prodding from the TSA is just plain silly. If they really were performing a useful check of passengers then there should have been other benefits, like not having to strip down to pass through the checkpoint. But for the first year or so the biometric authentication wasn't even considered proof of identity by the TSA – you still had to show a photo ID. Talk about stupid.