Empty legs can sometimes save up to 75% off regular private jet charter flights but you need to understand how they work and be flexible.
Can you benefit from empty leg private jet flights?
By various estimates, 30% to 50% of the private jet charter fleet flies empty.
Why?
Unlike airlines, which schedule aircraft and then sell seats, knowing at all times where planes are supposed to be and how many people are booked to fly, in private aviation, the jets are waiting to go and pick up passengers willing to pay as much as $15,000 per hour to fly in them.
In terms of structure, it’s as different as chalk and cheese.
Empty legs are the result of flying a plane to pick up a customer who has chartered the jet, in some cases, the jet’s owner, or a jet card customer.
Conversely, the empty flights are created when an owner or full-paying customer is dropped off, and the plane needs to be flown back to base.
Sometimes they also pop up after dropping off a customer and then flying to another airport to pick up the next customer, sort of like an Uber driver accepting a new customer while dropping off their current passenger.
Empty legs can come to market from months to hours before departure, but typically a few days in advance.
A look at the Airstream Jets website shows empty legs as far out as next April. For $5,000, you can fly in a Learjet 35A from Los Angeles to Bozeman, Montana.
You will see brokers and operators marketing empty legs at 50% to 80% off rack rates. In fact, a key perk of signing up for JetSmarter’s membership is access to empty legs, although, depending on the membership level, you don’t get the entire plane but a specific number of seats.
Jet Linx Aviation, JetSuite, and Wheels Up offer the flights flights as perks for their customers.
Victor and PrivateFly, and a long list of others, offer empty legs as part of their regular consumer promotions. You can even track empty leg offers on Twitter using the hashtag #emptyleg.
If they seem like too good a deal to be true, depending on how you plan to use them, they could be.
If the paying customer cancels their trip from Teterboro to Aspen, the empty leg you scored from Aspen to Teterboro will be canceled.
Or even worse, in the reverse, if you booked an empty leg from Teterboro to Aspen because the plane was supposed to be used for a full revenue flight from Aspen back to Teterboro, you might find your flight canceled anytime before departure if the person on the other side of the trip changes plans.
What it means is that if you want to play the empty-leg market, you need to be very flexible.
Don’t use an empty leg to fly someplace where you need to be there at a specific time or day.
Even if your empty leg isn’t canceled, it’s not unusual for your departure time to be moved.
The operator may need to change your schedule to make sure the flight crew doesn’t exceed their legal limits, with the priority being to ensure the flight for the full-paying customers departs on time.
If you want to get from Washington, D.C., to Palm Beach next week and don’t care about the time or day, you can save money and avoid the unpleasant experience of flying commercially.
My best advice is to use them between airports that already have frequent commercial service, so if your empty leg goes south, you can go to the other side of the airport and catch an airline flight.
The other thing to keep in mind is who the operator is. Just as you would scrutinize the operator and aircraft when buying an on-demand charter at full rate, do your due diligence on who will be flying you and make sure you are happy with the provider.
While JetSmarter isn’t a broker, they have a deal with XOJET for empty legs, meaning you will be flying with a quality operator.
Likewise, if you are a Wheels Up, Delta Private Jet, or Jet Linx customer, the empty legs they are offering are on aircraft they manage or own, so you know what you are getting.
For over 15 years, I’ve been involved in private aviation, and operators have been trying to reduce the percentage of empty flights, and many have.
However, the fact that empty legs are still so prevalent and available is that for people without flexibility, they are unlikely to work.
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