Editor’s Note – Charter Report 2022

No matter how old you are and which part of the world you are in, 1994 could be a memorable year for different reasons. Perhaps your highlight of the year was Nelson Mandela becoming President of South Africa following the country’s first interracial elections, or maybe you’ll always remember 1994 as the year that Nirvana’s frontman and guitarist Kurt Cobain passed away.

While that year might not be on too many people’s “year to be remembered” lists, in a quiet corner of a Vancouver office, Canadian Pacific Air Lines was getting ready to launch the world’s first airline website, which would, after a few years of updates, eventually go on to revolutionize how we all book flights.

Sadly, the charter industry has been unable to catch up with its airline counterparts. The stark reality is that the process of booking a charter flight is much more complex than booking a seat on a scheduled commercial airline flight, and while we go into more detail in a feature on page 6, it is the challenge that comes with booking a charter flight that makes it difficult to instantly determine the price of the flight in advance.

We have become so accustomed to having answers just a few seconds away from our fingertips, that it is frequently off-putting to anybody outside the industry that might be interested in finding out. Even inside the industry, I’m sure there are many of us who don’t really know the cost of chartering a G550 for a one-way flight between Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, or a Citation Latitude between Beijing and Shanghai.

“Getting with the times” as my father would say, is becoming more important as we welcome record new numbers of people into the world of chartering an aircraft. A straw poll of operators suggests that as many as 30% of recent charter enquiries have come from new clients who haven’t used private jets before, while a VistaJet report says that 70% of US hours were used by new program members.

Both numbers are impressive, but what would be more surprising is to see whether those new entrants stick around. In some cases, and in some geographies, that is easier said than done. Take Asia as an example – comparing the charter market in Asia to the one in the US is very much like comparing apples to potatoes. Unless, of course, you speak French.

While the US market is rife with options and competition, the market in Asia, particularly north Asia, is not. Want to charter a light jet to fly from New York to Boston? Simple. Want to charter a light jet from Beijing to Dalian? Sorry, it’s going to have to be a super-midsize or larger.

For this issue of the Charter Report, we took a slightly different approach to previous editions and included the most active operators in the region that are based in different regions. This information has been collated from flight hours – our analysts painstakingly looked through two years worth of flights into and around the region to build a list of the top 10 operators.

In addition to the usual hard data and intel you have come to expect, we also analyzed why there are no live charter booking apps, and present features and interviews with L’Voyage and Hongkong Jet. We also looked at Southeast Asia, a region that many people have had a close eye on for many years.

As always, we would like to take this opportunity to thank everybody that has contributed to this report, as well as all of its sponsors.

Sincerely,
Alud Davies
Editor-in-Chief
Asian Sky Group