Empty Leg Index

How this murky market actually works

Private jet pricing is a fog, and the fog is profitable. Here is the whole game in plain English, including exactly how we get paid.

What an empty leg is

An empty leg is a private jet flight that would otherwise fly with no passengers, so it gets sold off cheap. Repositioning means moving a jet from where one trip ended to where the next one starts. Someone already paid for the jet to fly somewhere. It has to fly home, or on to its next customer, whether anyone is aboard or not.

Think of a taxi driving back to town after a drop-off. The driver would rather take a passenger for a tenner than drive back empty. Same plane, same crew. The only thing missing was you.

Why the discounts are real, mostly

That "91% off" Ibiza to Nice hop is a real price for a real flight. But read the anchor. The discount is measured against the full charter price of the route, not against an airline ticket. Almost nobody pays full charter sticker price either.

So treat "90% off" as "startlingly cheap for a private jet", not "cheaper than easyJet". Short European hops routinely go for under €1,000, whole plane. Split four ways, that is airline-business-class money for your own jet.

Who you are actually dealing with

Three kinds of players sell these flights.

Operators own or run the jets. GlobeAir and ASL Group are operators: the planes, the crews and the licences are theirs. In Europe a legal operator holds an AOC, which is an Air Operator Certificate, the licence to carry paying passengers. The US equivalent is Part 135, which is the American rulebook for commercial charter flights. If a seller cannot name the operator, walk away.

Brokers and marketplaces sell you flights on other people's jets. Villiers is a marketplace: it shows flights from hundreds of operators and takes a cut of each booking. Brokers are not the villains here. A good one finds planes you never could. But you should always know which kind of company you are talking to.

The traps

The quote loop is the industry's favourite trick. A quote loop means a site that shows no price, only a form, which feeds your details to a salesperson who then calls you for days. You wanted a number. You became a lead.

Watch for these as well:

• Ghost legs. Expired flights left on a page as bait, so you enquire about one thing and get sold another.
• "From" prices that quietly exclude landing fees, de-icing and VAT.
• Urgency theatre. Countdown timers on flights nobody else is looking at.
• The vanishing leg. Your empty leg can move or cancel if the paying customer changes plans. This one is genuinely unavoidable, so book refundable hotels and treat the timing as flexible.

Our answer to all of this is boring on purpose. Every listing here shows a price or says "price on request", a date, an aircraft, and a link to the actual seller. When a source goes stale, the page says so. No forms and nobody will ring you.

How we make money, in plain sight

When you book a Villiers flight through our link, Villiers pays us a commission. Your price does not change. Links to GlobeAir, ASL Group and every other source pay us nothing, and we list them anyway, because the point is the full picture. That is the entire business model. No accounts, and your data is not for sale.

Questions people actually ask