At first this seems like an extremely simple question: chartered flights are obviously more expensive than normal scheduled flights. Most people get scheduled flights, why would you do anything else?

However, while this is obviously the case if you were to charter a flight yourself, in actual fact chartered flights are often chartered by holiday companies making them considerably cheaper. These flights have published schedules but the tickets cannot be purchased independently; they must be purchased through the holiday company. These chartered flights are the reason that holiday companies are able to provide such extremely cheap holidays.

What is a chartered flight? Flight charting is done by every airline and is required by airports before any aircraft can be given permission for takeoff. It basically refers to course plotting for the plane including scheduled take-off and landing times as well as the flight route. Many of the major well-known airlines charter their flights independently and publish schedules months or years ahead of time. Such companies are scheduled airlines. A chartered airline is an airline that specifically caters to individual customers and charters a flight for them. Such companies do charter flights for the rich and can cost a small fortune for a single flight, but this is not all that they do. By far the more common occupation for chartered airlines is chartering flights for large holiday companies. These companies charter much larger planes far further in advance, on a much more regular schedule. As such the flights chartered by holiday companies often appear similar to scheduled flights but with one important difference: the airline has no ability to sell individual tickets, the holiday company already owns all the seats on the flight.

Why use holiday-company chartered flights? The economics of the holiday chartered flight are actually fairly simple – at certain time of the year the demand for flights to key holiday destinations is much higher. This demand is amplified if the holiday company can assemble a package with a resort for cheap accommodation. As such it is a fairly cyclical process: the holiday company charters many flights and provides cheap accommodation at a resort; prices thus drop because of the enormous bulk purchases, and then demand rises further. In order for it to work every seat on the flight has to be taken. Scheduled flights usually cost more because they are compensating for the inevitable shortage of customers. Holiday companies can match demand and thus provide extremely cheap flights.

The benefits of the chartered flight are thus easy to see; while it at first appears that chartered flights may be more expensive, in reality they often work out to be considerably cheaper than anything a scheduled flight can offer. When you combine this with the cheap resort accommodation it equals extremely low prices for an extremely relaxing and easily organized holiday.

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