After giving us some tips on seasonality in Part 3 of his series, Joel Pennington gives us some insight today on how charter flights work and some important things you should know before snatching up the next ‘great deal’ you find:
You should now be forming a basic idea of how flights work so now we can start looking into other matters. Things don’t get much more abnormal than the roller-coaster of prices that come with a charter flight. Lets discuss shall we?
A charter flight is basically when a company buys every seat on a plane and sells them off. The reasons for doing this are generally to tie the flight to a hotel, resort or event/festival. For example Sunwing in Canada uses charter flights to bundle them with a hotel to offer the public a lower rate. But how does this affect us?
First of all, booking classes are out the window, forget about that. 99.9% of the time all tickets are non-refundable and are non-changeable so you better have cancellation insurance for the unexpected and you better be sure these are the dates and times you wanted. There is no room for error.
Once you book you are much more vulnerable to the company making a number of decisions, or potentially going broke (charter flights go under much more often than regular airlines as they run on incredibly tight margins). Off the top of my head a charter company went under last week doing flights out of Southern Ontario to Central Europe. As a result we are having a lot of people looking to fly to Budapest last minute. Getting your money back in these situations is tough at best and impossible at worst.
The other aspect to consider is you are open to the airline changing that flight at anytime. Now in saying that any airline reserves the right to do that but it is much more common among charter airlines as their profit margins are so low they may need to chop and change flights in order to break even or crawl into profit if certain flights are not filling up.
The truth of the matter is, you can snap up a bargain in the mayhem of it all. Personally I only book charter flights if I am completely flexible and don’t mind the airline changing my flight times to a couple of days before or after.
Courtesy of: Joel Pennington, International Travel Consultant, Flight Centre Canada.
You should now be forming a basic idea of how flights work so now we can start looking into other matters. Things don’t get much more abnormal than the roller-coaster of prices that come with a charter flight. Lets discuss shall we?
A charter flight is basically when a company buys every seat on a plane and sells them off. The reasons for doing this are generally to tie the flight to a hotel, resort or event/festival. For example Sunwing in Canada uses charter flights to bundle them with a hotel to offer the public a lower rate. But how does this affect us?
First of all, booking classes are out the window, forget about that. 99.9% of the time all tickets are non-refundable and are non-changeable so you better have cancellation insurance for the unexpected and you better be sure these are the dates and times you wanted. There is no room for error.
Once you book you are much more vulnerable to the company making a number of decisions, or potentially going broke (charter flights go under much more often than regular airlines as they run on incredibly tight margins). Off the top of my head a charter company went under last week doing flights out of Southern Ontario to Central Europe. As a result we are having a lot of people looking to fly to Budapest last minute. Getting your money back in these situations is tough at best and impossible at worst.
The other aspect to consider is you are open to the airline changing that flight at anytime. Now in saying that any airline reserves the right to do that but it is much more common among charter airlines as their profit margins are so low they may need to chop and change flights in order to break even or crawl into profit if certain flights are not filling up.
The truth of the matter is, you can snap up a bargain in the mayhem of it all. Personally I only book charter flights if I am completely flexible and don’t mind the airline changing my flight times to a couple of days before or after.
Courtesy of: Joel Pennington, International Travel Consultant, Flight Centre Canada.
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