Charter means renting the whole aircraft with its crew. You are not paying for a seat, you are paying for the business jet and for the time it spends on you: the flight to reach you, your own leg, the waiting and the return to base. Understanding that arithmetic saves more than haggling over the rate.
The flight-hour rate is a wet charter rate: crew, fuel, insurance and routine maintenance are already inside it. Even so, the invoice almost never equals that rate multiplied by the time you spend in the air.
So the right question to put to an operator is not “how much is an hour” but “how much will my particular trip cost, with every leg included”. That question always has a specific answer.
The basic formula is simple: flight time × the rate for the category + repositioning + fees. Flight time is not taken from the straight-line distance: taxiing, climb and descent add roughly half an hour to a trip.
On short legs the economics turn inside out: most operators apply a minimum charge per flight, so a 40-minute leg costs as much as an hour and a half or two. On long legs it is the other way round — the hour works out cheaper, because the repositioning is spread across a lot of flying.
A calculation for your own route, with the distance, the time and the business jets that suit it, is available on this site — the figures come from our own rate database, not from a “starting at” number.
Parking is a separate story. On peak dates in Olbia, Ibiza or Salzburg a business jet drops its passengers and leaves, because there is no room on the apron. That is not an operator's whim but physics: those repositioning flights are exactly where empty legs come from.
Three questions narrow the choice down to two or three options: how many people, where exactly, and into which airport. The third one is where people usually get it wrong.
Wet charter rates start at around $2 600 per flight hour on a light business jet and go up to $12 000–16 000 on ultra-long-range aircraft and bizliners. The total for a trip depends on the leg, the repositioning and the fees: a short leg is almost always more expensive per hour.
Yes. The price does not depend on the number of passengers — you are paying for the whole business jet. One passenger and eight cost the same, which is why charter is better assessed per group.
An empty leg is a repositioning flight the business jet performs with or without you. The price is several times lower, but the route, the date and the time are set by the aircraft's schedule, not by the passenger. Such flights appear 1–7 days before departure.
No. Check-in at a business aviation terminal takes minutes: there is no need to turn up three hours early, and you are walked out to the business jet almost straight away.
Tell us the route, the date and how many people are flying — we will match the aircraft and give you a price.