Airliner Charter Issues and Costs

[sparkymarky]

Not sure what the correct forum is for this speculative question, so apologies if this is the wrong location.

My company is looking at the possibility of chartering an airliner for a UK to Spain round trip. There seem to be plenty agencies offering charter services, but before approaching them - and running the risk of multiple follow up sales calls - I thought I'd seek some informal advice on a couple of points.

1. If they were to run such a charter as a commercial venture, what licensing and other legislative requirements are there? We are not a travel agency, but there may be a gap in the market for us to profitably invest some capital in this venture on a one-off basis.

2. Can anyone give me a broad idea of indicative costs and what influences them. Say as an example a 737-300 in ~148 seat configuration from somewhere like PIK to Spain for a single return journey with an overnight stay. A second scenario might change it from an overnight to two night stay.

Once again apologies if this is the wrong forum. All comments welcome.

Thanks.

[LGWAlan]

Hey Sparky

I looked into this last year for a trip we were planning. I have me a feeling that it was gonna be around 45k for a trip from LGW to Debrecen in Hungary - it worked out cheaper for us to fly LHR to BUD and get the train. I tried AC and BE as they both offer it - soon coming to the conlusion that a group fare on a sked airline was cheaper.

[Aviation Trainer too]

Give Channel Express Charter sales a call on 01202-597600. This way there is no broker involved and no unwanted follow up calls, nor any commision.

[Select Reverse]

I would give Maersk Air UK or whatever they are calling themselves a pretty wide berth as they have continually let many people down by cancelling charters after committing to them and therefore have proved themselves unreliable. They only have Embraers or CRJ's now after disposing of their larger aircraft. I understand that the previous man in charge of charters was pretty fed up with the set up there and was glad to be out! Maybe they no longer do charters?

[EGNR]

FYI, to be able to run such a charter as a commercial venture, you will need ATOL cover. Whilst charter carriers may be able to give you a price indication, they're legally prohibited by the CAA from operating such flights unless the charterer has applicable ATOL cover.

In reality, you may find it necessary to contact a decent broker that will actually be able to cover you with ATOL.
Try: www.chapman-freeborn.com or www.airpartner.com which may be able to help further.

As you'll probably guess, ad-hoc specialists which frequently have aircraft available, such as Titan Airways and European Air Charter tend to be more expensive than other charter operators offering similar capacity aircraft, which generally have much more restricted availability.

[BOTFOJ]

If you or your company are making seats available to the public for profit you require ATOL coverage for your charter. If it is a 'sole use' ie a company chartering an aircraft as an entity to take its guests on a non-profit making flight then you are OK.

Brokers are generally OK, they do all the leg work for you, some are noticably better than others, but they charge for their services - usually 5% on a charter like this. There is no commitment so you can always ring a few and see what sort of response you get, some of the smaller operations are better than the big glitzy Brokers if you dont want to get hassled too much by follow up calls and broker BS.

You can ring the airlines yourself, phone the switchboard and ask for Commercial, again the response you get will vary from the helpful to the 'what are you bothering us for' to the rip-off, and somewhere in the middle of all that is your answer.

Mainline charter carriers are cheaper than the adhoc specialists if you can find the golden nugget of availability.

If you are looking at a 2 nightstop, it depends on time of year, during the summer, forget a mainline charter carrier as they will have odd slots here and there and not be able to release an aircraft for 2-3 days, the adhoc specialist airlines will, in likelihood, but you will pay through the nose and then some.
You might get lucky with a 2 one way flight on a mainline charter airline and this could well work out cheaper than an adhoc airline on a layover.

If you have a winter enquiry (Nov-Apr) you will have more luck, with availability and your choice of carriers.

If you are looking for a PIK to say MAD with a one nightstop and you found a 733 available, the price could be anything between 30 and 50K depending on how long and when your request is.

hope this helps.

[sparkymarky]

Excellent. Thanks for all the feedback. Very useful and much appreciated.