Social Icons

Pages

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Charter Planes - What You Need To Know

By Ian Tate


Charter flights are an alternative to commercial flights. In 1987 the Civil Aeronautics Board opened charters to the public and permitted a great deal of flexibility and competitiveness. Anyone can fly a public charter. Because it's not restricted to an individual, flights can also be chartered by groups.

Charters can be flown to one city and return from somewhere else. Tickets for half roundtrips, or one-way tickets known in charter industry, can be bought. Commercial airlines can only land in 560 airports with landing strips long enough to support them while charters can land at over 5,300 airports in the U.S. This means that unlike commercial airlines, charters can get you closer to your final destination.

Unlike scheduled flights, you deal directly with the wholesale tour operators who act as core entities in charter flights. In turn, the tour operators charter entire planes or segments of planes from airlines to fly specific routes at specific times. What they do is either sell tickets or set fares through their own retrial outlets, discount dealerships, or travel agents.

The price is a main advantage of charter flights. The fares, which costs $50-$200 less than the lowest round-trip excursion fair on a scheduled airline, would fluctuate considerably depending on the seasons. The charter fares slide low on off-days and higher on weekends depending on the changes in travel.

Selling half round-trips that permit you to fly to one destination and return from another are larger operators with many flights to different places. Two half round-trips cost only slightly more than one "whole" round-trip. Even though there are larger operators that allow you to alter your return tip, don't count on every charter for this privilege. Providing the only nonstop or direct service overseas from interior cities are charters.

One of the main drawbacks of charters is that they don't go everywhere. Few charters are available to countries with government protectionist policies toward national or state-owned airlines even though many charter flights take off for Southeast Asia or Europe. There are few charters that are available to the Far East. Secondly, charters have restricted and inflexible schedules. Arranging back to back flights into places for example, Los Angeles You can't fly within the week or any other day but you can stay a number of weeks.

Charter passengers must pay for the charter flight weeks or possibly months in advance. The seats will be sold until the last minute by tour operators but filling up early are the most desirable dates. When passengers cancel or alter their travel plans, they are subject to substantial penalties.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment