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The crisis game continues. An amazing thing: it seems to have long been known that economic shocks make only the poor poor, while the rich bring additional income. That is, if you look at what is happening through the prism of private and business aviation, in theory, prosperity should be observed. But no, they save on what you can. Well, let's save. Moreover, there is a way for this – flights on the empty legs system.
Light
World civil aviation did not appear suddenly, but developed in an evolutionary way. To become a profitable business, she needed a lot: reliable high-speed aircraft, modern airports, an air traffic control system, communications and navigation, and so on. All these technical and organizational tricks pursued the main goal: to ensure the loading of the carrying capacity. Simply put, planes have to fly constantly, because only then will they be profitable. From the plane on the ground, the airline is one harm.
Private and business aviation is largely relieved of such a tough dictate of profitability, because it works according to a more flexible scheme and does not save on matches. Nevertheless, the interest to earn extra money is present here as well.
A business plane flies out of schedule, that is, in fact, outside of the regular scheme, and therefore often has to “carry the air”, which is very expensive in aviation. For this reason, flights are paid both ways.
Suppose the customer is flying from Moscow to London. The plane is, for example, in Munich. Why Munich? It's very simple: to be based in Europe is much cheaper than in Russia. Accordingly, the customer pays not only for his flight Moscow – London, but also for the passage of an empty plane from Munich to Vnukovo.
The cost of each flight is made up of many components: fuel, airport service fees, navigation fees, crew salaries, and a bunch of deductions. Actually, the tariff for the transportation of one passenger seat from point A to point B is not such a large share in the total amount. In fact, the passenger of a charter flight pays for the entire operational cycle, of which his flight is a part. And the other part is the ferrying of an empty plane, which is called empty leg (literally – “empty legs”, meaning “light”). It is here that the opportunity to get additional profit is contained – to take a passing passenger. The benefit of the passenger is the opportunity to fly practically at half price.
Air sale
Although the delivery of an empty aircraft to the airport of departure or its return to the base is always paid by the customer of the business charter, the very principle of air transportation has always been an unsolved problem in business aviation. Indeed – not to send the co-pilot to the terminal to invite passing passengers? After all, the issue of departure is resolved in a matter of hours, and it was not possible to post information about it in advance.
The solution to the problem was the Internet. Today in the world there are many Internet resources that constantly post up-to-date lists of empty legs. There are public resources, but the most complete lists of empty hauls are available only to professional market participants.
In its simplest form, the scheme for using empty tracks looks like this. The passenger orders a flight from Moscow to London, after which the plane will have to return to its base, for example, to Munich. The operator company publishes information about an empty leg on the empty legs resource in advance, and after completing the main order, it detains the plane at the airport, waiting for a suitable opportunity to sell the empty leg in whole or in part.
At the same time, a potential passenger with an empty leg does not have to fly exactly on the London – Munich route, if necessary, he can fly from London to somewhere else, or the plane will be served from London to the required airport.
The amount of savings, of course, fluctuates depending on the circumstances, because the most economical flight option is a complete coincidence of the route, while if it changes, the buyer of the empty leg will pay extra. But in any case, you can safely count on a minimum of 15% savings, even if the plane has to drop in for a passenger somewhere off to the side of the main route. On various sites, absolutely fantastic discounts are advertised – up to 60% of the cost of the flight. Perhaps ideally it succeeds, but the real figures are somewhere in the range of 30-40%. This is a lot, you must agree. As old Scrooge used to say, “money saved is money earned.”
Expiration date on packaging
Up-to-date interactive lists of empty legs are now posted on many resources, but it is not so easy to use them: most often the lists are incomplete, because their publication in one way or another depends on the relationships of market participants. Professional systems are the lot of professionals.
For example, the European system Avinode, designed for booking charter flights, contains about a thousand positions for the sale of empty flights every day, but it is available only to operators and brokers, that is, it works according to the business to business scheme. Actually, only a professional market participant can buy a package of services of this computer system. Moreover, it is very difficult for an ordinary person to understand it.
Common use resources are a different matter. They do not give direct access to operators, and brokers post information on such sites. In fact, this is the Internet market where anyone can enter and quickly monitor the current list of empty legs offers. In Russia, such a resource is Jetonline.ru. Empty legs offer lists can be found in other corners of the Internet, even on the websites of travel companies, but this is not the same scale.
In fact, it was only the emergence of a powerful single resource that made it possible to quickly and efficiently search for offers, because it was much more difficult to work with many fragmented sites. After all, the empty leg is a perishable product, the success of the sale here depends on time.
The interest in flying with empty legs is now more than ever. Until recently, they were the lot of novice users of a business charter, and today the opportunity to buy a flight at half price is increasingly of interest to those who previously quite calmly paid for a full charter in both shoulders. Selling empty tracks also makes life much easier for brokers. In a sense, this is just their bread: in some cases, only the empty leg allows the broker to fulfill the order at a profit.
If the popularity of empty legs continues to grow at the current rate, there could theoretically be a situation where the number of offers will begin to decline and the cost will rise. Already, some market participants are thinking about whether the system of selling empty hauls will face a shortage of fully paid charter flights. However, it looks more like a fairy tale: even the global economic crisis did not slam a business charter as a phenomenon, and if a comet hits the Earth, empty legs will not help us.
Comment
Leonid Koshelev, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Jet-2000:
An empty leg discount can be up to 40% off the price of a regular charter, so the passenger gets the flight at a very attractive price. We often resort to searching for empty legs, as we strive to minimize the costs of our clients. Also, requests have recently become more frequent, where clients themselves stipulate that they are only interested in empty leg. On empty legs account for 5-10% of commercial flights of our company. We use the Avinode system to search for offers. In our opinion, it is now used by the largest number of market participants, which greatly simplifies the search.
Author: Alexander SHVYDKIN
Source: Jet Magazine # 9 (67)
