Can private aviation charter users ensure they secure good value AND good service when booking flights? Chris Kjelgaard spoke to the CEOs of three leading private charter aircraft booking and services marketplaces to learn more…
Surprising as it might seem, a key factor shaping the private aircraft charter business is that its clients are always looking to save money on their flights. Clients are very price-sensitive, always looking for the cheapest option, according to Paul Malicki, CEO of Flapper.
More than 400,000 downloads of its app to date have produced 30,000-plus clients who have booked, paid for and flown on charter flights arranged through Brazil-headquartered Flapper, which has an active presence throughout all of South America, North America and Europe.
“The industry is absolutely obsessed with price, but it’s difficult to explain that the best price is not necessarily the best value” when chartering private aircraft, he adds. “Typically, we do not recommend the cheapest option, but the most comfortable one.”
Occasionally a client can obtain a very good price for a charter performed by an operator with a top-notch safety record, and which offers a high-level on-board service, when booking what would otherwise have been an empty-leg flight. But such bookings are “pretty rare” in Flapper’s markets, says Malicki.
More commonly, clients seeking the cheapest charter option can find themselves on aircraft which are only available occasionally for passenger charters and spend most of their time operating medevac flights or flights performed on behalf of cost-plus government contracts, particularly when those aircraft mainly operate in emerging-nation markets, he notes.
The operators of such aircraft usually regard executive charters as “top-up” revenues on their core business, and often the private jets which are mainly used for medevac or government-contract work in emerging markets are “not taken care of and are old models”, Malicki says. Their interiors are “probably very used”.
But there are several ways in which clients, working with reputable, well-regarded brokers can seek to ensure their charter bookings are highly cost-effective both in terms of price and service.
Going Beyond the Basic Booking Function
The most basic way is to use a brokerage whose services to clients go well beyond arranging a flight booking. Nowadays, brokerages which have online booking and/or broker contact platforms may also – via their apps or through having prospective clients talk to a charter broker – provide ways for clients to check the standards and nature of services any given operator will offer.
Such brokerages may also offer ways for clients looking for charter flights to book additional services a selected operator doesn’t routinely offer. In markets where high-quality in-flight and ground service standards often aren’t offered or expected – such as the USA, where in-flight catering on short-haul flights is usually cold-food service at most and might not include alcoholic beverages – those brokerages offer clients optional add-ons they can order.
Those optional add-ons may include anything from adding a second pilot for client safety-assurance purposes (in the USA, Part 135 charters of aircraft which are below a certain maximum gross weight don’t require two pilots), to arranging for hot food to be provided on board by a flight attendant (the provision of whom, similarly, might be an optional add-on).
Other options might include arranging limousine transportation to and from the flight, or perhaps providing a post-flight booking for a helicopter flight to the client’s final destination (helicopter bookings are particularly popular for clients travelling to Monte Carlo from the airports at Cannes or Nice, for instance).
Some brokerages also offer additional concierge-type options, such as arranging hotel accommodation, booking meeting rooms, and purchasing tickets to entertainment options such as excursions, concerts, theater performances and big sports events.
The Growing Role of Online Brokerage Platforms
“Operator-agnostic platforms are a good way to go” when booking private charters, rather than relying on a phone call to a charter broker whom the client doesn’t know and hasn’t dealt with previously, says Richard Hekker, CEO of Europe-based OPES JET, which bills itself as “the world’s first reverse-auction marketplace for private jet charters”.
According to Hekker, “About 80% of charters are now going through brokers,” and “about 93% of Europe [private-charter carriers] operate on Avinode”. While Avinode undoubtedly provides charter operators with plenty of potential business leads (as many as 100 charter broker requests per day may reach any given carrier), often only one to two end up in charters that carrier actually flies, Hekker claims.
The operator is charged a varying fee for every aircraft for which it provides booking leads. But probably the thorniest issue for the client who wants to make a charter booking, and is financially capable of doing so, is that many brokers traditionally “just want to make a buck” as quickly and easily as they can, Hekker reckons.
Such brokers – often individuals working out of their homes, armed with a telephone and computer – may know little about the charter industry, may not perform more than the most basic research on operators, and may be unscrupulous in their business dealings with the client.
According to Hekker, many brokers are only intent on accepting the cheapest operator bid for a given client’s inquiry. What then happens is that, without the client knowing how much that operator has bid or anything about its service levels, the broker pockets the difference between the operator bid and the amount the client has indicated they’re willing to pay.
Essentially, the client is left with a booked flight but no idea of how dispatch-reliable or safe the operator is. They will know little-to-nothing about the condition of the aircraft in which they’ll be flying, about the relevant on-type experience the pilots will have, the level of onboard service they can expect, or how likely the flight is to operate on schedule.
OPES JET, which has a very different business model to that of traditional charter brokerage, obtains its revenues by charging the client booking the flight a 4% fee of the total flight cost quoted by the operator. Operators using the platform for booking leads and to offer quotes do so for free.
In its three years of operation, Hekker highlights the reverse-auction booking platform has achieved average annual booking lead-conversion rates of 35-50%. In other words, while OPES JET will pass on far fewer charter booking leads to any given operator using the platform than Avinode (for example), the carrier’s staff generally has to do much less work to winnow out the chaff from those leads and successfully obtain a booking.
Going Beyond Traditional to Improve Service and Information
As brokerage platforms, OPES JET, Flapper, and presumably others go well beyond what many traditional ‘seat-of-the-pants’ brokers would offer clients in terms of services and information.
Using different approaches, these platforms give clients a substantial amount of information on the aircraft they’re booking. These include (in Flapper’s case, via pre-booking live discussions with its booking staff) the cost per seat for the flight; the operator’s safety certifications from Argus, Wyvern, etc.; the overall flying experience; and the specific on-type experience of the actual pilots who will fly the aircraft.
Again, in Flapper’s case, before booking the client is notified whether the operator will charge extra for onboard Wi-Fi and that they will charge a substantial extra fee if aircraft de-icing is needed. And, unlike many traditional brokers, Flapper includes the taxes which will be levied on the flight in the quote.
Meanwhile, via its app OPES JET offers clients an operator-rating system to which its clients can contribute by providing ratings on real flights, performed by real operators, which they have taken. The company awards operators a bronze, silver or gold rating depending on the service standards they’ve demonstrated to OPES JET and its clients.
Again, by means of access using its portal, OPES JET additionally offers its clients payment and concierge services which go well beyond their basic flight bookings through a sister company called Olympus Pay and Elite Services.
On an à la carte basis, clients can add as many services as they wish to their basic bookings – up to and including villa charters, meals created by three-Michelin-star chefs, yacht charters, and special experiences – as well as ground and helicopter transportation options.
How a B2B Platform Can Help Operators, Brokers & Clients
Also breaking with the traditional charter brokerage business model is VOO Flights, an Austria-based company which ultimately aids industry professionals, equipping them with tools that make their daily charter business with their clients run smoothly, efficiently, and glitch-free.
It offers calculated charter prices, flight logistics and other services to charter brokers and aircraft operators, along with – importantly – confirmed bookings via its B2B platform.
This allows operators to automate quoting, lower the cost of the quoting process, and thus reduce the quote prices they can offer, while also helping them make the scheduling, planning and operation of their flights more dispatch-reliable and on time. To date more than 150 operators have signed up with VOO Flights, it claims.
At the same time, and also via the VOO Flights B2B platform (which was launched three years ago and is fully functional, but continues to be developed, adding new integrations, tools and functionalities to meet the needs and demands of the market), VOO offers specialist functionalities to charter brokers, too. These include automatically calculated charter prices, digital offers to their clients, and discounts on available empty legs.
These potentially can be calculated by knowing which flights various operators have already booked and planned in terms of the amounts of extra time they have built into their aircraft schedules for pre-flight and post-flight aircraft parking and positioning.
Armed with that knowledge, a savvy digital marketplace such as VOO Flights – whose CEO Robert Plhak accumulated substantial experience of the private aircraft-charter industry before founding his new company – can work with operators to provide them and brokers’ booking clients with additional revenue-flight options.
Those options can be realized during periods of time in which operators’ aircraft would otherwise be sitting for long periods on the ground or flying empty legs which wouldn’t have any paying charter clients onboard. According to the VOO Flights platform, more than 250 charter brokerages now use VOO’s specialized broker features.
Questions Charter Brokers Should Be Asking Operators
While the three brokerage platform CEOs interviewed for this article view which information-gathering roles should rightly belong to the charter-seeking client and which should belong to the charter broker handling the client’s inquiry differently, all agree firmly on one basic principle – namely, the most important questions client, broker, or both can ask of the operator.
They should aim to understand in detail the operator’s safety record and all its relevant safety and operational ratings. And they should seek to know exactly how much relevant experience the pilots who will actually perform the flight have.
Flapper and OPES JET will make all of that information available to the client booking that flight, either upfront and openly through their apps, or upon request through their charter booking agents.
(Flapper also uses its own internal operator-safety categories, and was the first charter broker in the Southern Hemisphere to be awarded an Argus certification, Malicki notes.)
In other cases, safety information specific to the flight operator might not be so easily available to the client, in which case, Plhak notes, the question becomes, “Does the end-client speak to the broker, or to the operator directly?
“Normally, the [high-quality] broker takes care of all matters for the operator,” he suggests, and thus should be able to answer all of the client’s questions about the operator’s safety performance and the relevant flight experience of its pilots directly.
“The broker can be really picky with [the operator’s] documentation, including the total hours and the hours on type of its crew; its safety rating, its insurance policy, its AOC [Air Operator Certificate], and its safety record.”
As either the charter client, or the brokerage, “You should be able to trust that certificated operator,” he says. “Normally the broker asks the questions about the operator to protect their clients, as well as their own reputations.”
According to Plhak, however, some private aircraft charter operators have sought to cut the broker out of the booking process, by trying “to get more and more into the end-client business”. The problem is that “they aren’t used to communicating and covering the information needed, so I believe the broker is a necessary part of the industry.”
Questions Charter Clients Should Be Asking
Nevertheless, he adds, clients should actively ask lots of questions – not of the operator, but of the broker(s) they’re considering using to handle their booking inquiries. Those questions should aim to elucidate whether the broker has the experience, the contacts, and the resources to handle each client’s business properly.
“As the client, you should ask the broker, a) How long have you been in the market?; b) How many employees do you have?; c) What did you do before you became a broker?; d) How many offices do you have?; e) What is your relationship to the operators – do you check their documents and audit them?; and f) Do you – not the operators – have an Argus or Wyvern rating?”
Hekker believes that clients should be able to communicate directly with the operators who will perform the flights, in order to obtain answers to safety questions which go beyond the general operator-safety record and pilot-experience issues outlined above.
These particularly include whether the pilots (and flight attendant where applicable) speak the language used by the passengers who will be onboard for the charter flight, he highlights.
Clients should also ask the operator whether the pilots scheduled to fly the aircraft on that flight are qualified. Does their training or certification include performing landing operations at the destination airport, particularly if that airport requires special landing procedures and pilot certifications?
And Hekker notes that some airports aren’t qualified for commercial operations, including Part 135 charter flights. An important question for the operator thus becomes whether the airport planned as the destination airport is even certified to receive the flight.
An Important Money-Saving, Service-Enhancing Tip
One tip in particular, offered by both Malicki and Hekker, probably has more potential than any other to help charter clients keep the price of their charter flights down and increase the chances of enhancing their flight comfort and experience. Both note that, when assessing the potential safety and quality of their flight experiences, most charter clients focus on the apparent age of the aircraft in which they’ll be flying, often expressed as ‘Year of Manufacture’.
Some clients may even base their charter-booking decisions on that one piece of data. Another way clients look at the same basic information, Hekker says, is to see how old an aircraft is, expressed as being, say, “seven years old”. Such clients are completely missing the point, Hekker and Malicki argue. Modern private jets undergo major overhauls [D-Checks] every ten to 12 years, depending on the specific type certification approvals for a given aircraft type.
A ‘D’ check doesn’t necessarily require the complete refurbishment of the aircraft’s interior. But, in practice, the owners and operators of most business aviation aircraft usually decide to refurbish the interiors of their aircraft completely while their planes are undergoing those overhauls.
They do so for any of several reasons. One reason, often enough in itself, is that a ‘D’ check is so thorough that it involves the aircraft being completely stripped down to its skin and every part being checked – a process which usually takes several months.
While a ‘D’ check is expensive, the fact the aircraft has to be out of service over a period of months often persuades its owner not only to fork out for the maintenance, but also for a partial or full cabin refurbishment. This additional spending may also be prompted by the fact that technology (particularly cabin entertainment) has moved on substantially over the 10 or 12 years since the aircraft either was delivered new or received its previous major refurbishment.
Less-informed charter clients may not realize that an 11-year old aircraft of a certain type which received a ‘D’ check after 10 years, is almost certain to have a one-year old, recently refurbished cabin, complete with all the latest bells and whistles in terms of onboard Wi-Fi, streaming video capabilities, new furniture and (possibly) new fittings, and up-to-date HVAC equipment. Instead, they might automatically opt to charter a seven-year-old aircraft, ignoring a much more comfortably equipped aircraft which – because of its calendar age – may be offered for charter at a lower charter rate.
Similarly, says Malicki, a Gulfstream G450 manufactured in 1998 but refurbished completely in 2018 “is probably a very, very attractive aircraft, with a decent [charter] price”. Malicki cites a specific example of an older aircraft which very much offers a current-technology cabin experience.
The aircraft in question, for which Flapper booked a night-long charter flight on behalf of a client in mid-December, is a 24-year-old Gulfstream GV long-range jet, which includes both Starlink satcom Wi-Fi and fully reclining seat-beds, received a full cabin refurbishment in 2023.
An Important Money-Saving, Service-Enhancing Tip
Discussing the European charter-booking experience, Plhak notes that “a well-booked operator will not give discounts” to brokers for client bookings on what they hope might be empty-leg sectors.
This is because many operators now plan their bookings not on the traditional basis of flying a paid sector from originating airport A to destination B and then positioning the aircraft empty to destination C for another paid booking.
Instead, they can find full-rate bookings for the sector from B via D and E to C, so the aircraft is booked heavily throughout its entire flight itinerary for a given trip and produces two more empty sectors B to D and E to C which would be marked in the same fashion.
If a charter brokerage is able to find a discount for a client’s booking because the booking is made on what otherwise would be an empty positioning leg, the client should be aware that because the aircraft is already booked for revenue flying both before and after the empty leg, there may be very little flexibility in its schedule for that leg, Plhak advises.
As a charter client, “You can expect the same [ground and in-flight] experience with a discount flight as you would have with a normal charter flight,” says Plhak. “But there will be some restrictions on time flexibility, [depending how busy] the operator is.”
For instance, he adds, “If the operator mis-plans [the previous charter] and the aircraft is late, your 10:00am flight might be late.
“It is the operator’s responsibility to leave some time in the schedule to allow for a timely following flight [after a previous charter], or else ask the client [who has booked the discount charter] to delay,” Plhak concludes. “So, when [operators] give discounts on empty legs, the clients may lose flexibility.”
Adopted and published text – AvBuyer. Words: Chris Kjelgaard.
Ivanna is a professional journalist and communications specialist; she channels her creative energy and passion for words to shape outstanding cross-media stories for VOO and the industry’s vibrant media. Ivanna holds a master’s degree in journalism and a professional development certificate in science communication.
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