(06-01-2017 03:20 PM)JMUETC Wrote:  

(06-01-2017 03:08 PM)HyperDuke Wrote:  Would be interesting to hear how one might find a cheap deal on a charter flight. If I've got a crew flying out to Vegas, it would be great if for at least one leg of the trip, we got to charter for a similar price.

Look around, it's doable depending on how many folks are going. My experience is it is slightly more expensive than commercial, but not outrageous. Of course it depends on where your going, how many are going and dates, etc. Evojets is one such service.

The only way to make it close is to fill the plane up. Are we talking six, 12, 24, 50, 100??? You can charter plans for any amount of people but don't get one bigger than you need. I will say that if you are only going with about 12 and going that far, you will never compete with a commercial flight. However, if you are going down to FL or a similar distance and something like a King Air will fit then you can get it relatively close to the same price if you take into account saving on a night of a hotel, maybe saving on a day of rental cars, in our case, NASCAR racing, we usually saved on a day of per diem costs, and we were able to keep the employees working at the shop right up until it was time to go, along with getting them back to work sooner after a race. If all these costs/savings are added up it can easily break even or make a company some money versus commercial. Rarely can a few individuals, not on business, manage to make it pay off.

At one point, a group of teams got together and chartered a jet every week from US Airways for our Sunday morning guys. Most teams had about 10 guys that only went to the track on the day of the race to pit the car, not to prepare it for the actual race, those guys went early in the week. But that "Sunday morning plane" left every race weekend at 5:00 am and departed after the race two hours following the checkered flag. This kept us from having to purchase all the items I mentioned above that we would have had to spend money on should we have flown commercial. The costs was $600 per head flying on a 737 no matter whether we were going to Daytona, Michigan, Talladega, or up to Loudon, NH. This wasn't the price the airline charged us for the aircraft, because one trip might be more than another, but we made teams sign up for the whole season with the number of passengers they needed to get on the plane then took the entire season costs from US Airways and divided it up by the total number of passengers to come up with the $600 per passenger fee each team paid.

For the guys that went to the track early, many teams had a plane for those guys, usually 6 to 8 people would go early on this plane and for most teams it was a King Air 200. We never owned our own plane so I made a deal with a charter company at the beginning of the season for every race and each race we paid a different amount totally based of distance or what they use is engine hours.

Again, for a trip like you are talking about, to Vegas, you'll never compete with the cost of a commercial flight. We always flew commercial when going across the country, but did use those Sunday night red-eyes for our return trip even though they were a killer on us trying to get in a day's work on Monday's. We were all glad there were only a handful of those west coast races.

Was referencing the situation where a charter is booked one-way, but needs to go back. I've heard there are insane charter deals to be found in such a scenario, but wasn't sure how to search for those opportunities. I realize that charter planes are usually prohibitively expensive, BP.

(06-01-2017 08:37 PM)HyperDuke Wrote:  Was referencing the situation where a charter is booked one-way, but needs to go back. I've heard there are insane charter deals to be found in such a scenario, but wasn't sure how to search for those opportunities. I realize that charter planes are usually prohibitively expensive, BP.