Private flight booking splits into three markets that barely overlap. There is cost-sharing at £50 to £350 a seat, charter marketplaces at £3,000 to £20,000 a trip, and the empty-leg market that sits alongside charter selling the same aircraft at half price with conditions attached.
Most roundups treat these as one list ranked by quality. They are not comparable. Here is what each is for.
Charter Marketplaces
Victor — The Best of the European Marketplaces
Victor gives access to roughly 7,000 aircraft and, unusually for the sector, shows you the comparison. You submit a route, and instead of one broker's recommendation you get options across operators with pricing you can weigh against each other before committing.
That transparency is the reason to use it. The traditional charter broker model works on an opaque margin, and Victor's model puts the aircraft, the operator and the price in front of you together. Its European coverage is the strongest part, which matters if you are flying out of London.
It is broker-assisted rather than fully self-service, which is the right design. Somebody checks the booking before it goes to the operator.
PrivateFly — Faster Quotes, Better Empty-Leg Matching
PrivateFly's reputation is built on quoting speed, and it is deserved — quotes come back in minutes rather than hours, which matters when a trip is being decided in a meeting.
The feature we rate most is the empty-leg alerting. You set a profile with your usual routes and it tells you when a repositioning flight comes up that matches. Given empty legs mostly surface 24 to 72 hours out, an alert is the difference between catching one and reading about it.
Which of the Two
For a first charter where you want to understand what you are paying for, Victor. For repeat flying on known routes where speed and empty-leg access matter more than comparison, PrivateFly. We use both.
Cost-Sharing
Wingly — Genuinely Cheap, Genuinely Different
A qualified private pilot lists a flight they were already planning, and passengers contribute to the direct costs. The pilot cannot make a profit. This is explicitly regulated by the Civil Aviation Authority, not a loophole, and the CAA publishes the conditions a cost-shared flight has to meet.
The numbers are in a different universe from charter. A 30-minute sightseeing flight runs £50 to £80 a person. London to Bournemouth and back is around £57 a head. London to the Isle of Wight, roughly £110. One-way to further destinations from about £179.
What you get is a Cessna 172 or Piper PA-28 with three passenger seats, flying from airfields like Denham, Elstree, White Waltham, Blackbushe or North Weald. No cabin crew, no catering, no toilet, and a light aircraft's ride quality in anything but calm air.
It is not a downgraded charter. It is a different activity that happens to involve a small plane, and on that basis it is excellent value. We covered how it works in detail in Pilot Cost Sharing UK.
When it does not fit: fixed schedules, weather-critical trips, anyone who needs to arrive at a specific time. Cost-shared flights are VFR and cancel for weather more readily than charter.
Empty Legs
An empty leg is a repositioning flight. If someone charters a jet from London to Nice, the aircraft has to get to London first and then get from Nice to wherever it is needed next. Those legs cost the operator money whether anyone is aboard or not, so they are sold at whatever they can get.
The discount is real: typically 50 to 75% off retail.
| Route | Retail charter | Empty leg |
|---|---|---|
| London–Nice | €15,000–22,000 | €5,500–9,500 |
| London–Geneva | €12,000–18,000 | €4,500–7,500 |
London produces more of these than almost anywhere, because Farnborough, Luton, Biggin Hill and Stansted together handle over 80,000 business aviation movements a year, and every one of those trips generates repositioning.
The conditions, which are the whole story. The flight exists because of somebody else's booking, so you take their date, their departure time and their airports. Most empty legs appear 24 to 72 hours before departure, once the paid leg is confirmed. And around one in fifteen is cancelled or rescheduled when the original client moves.
That failure rate is the thing to understand before you build a weekend around one. An empty leg is an excellent way to take a trip you were flexible about anyway. It is a poor way to get to a wedding.
Where to find them: the marketplaces above list them, PrivateFly's alerts are the best of the automated options, and operator mailing lists are worth joining if you fly a route regularly. There are dedicated empty-leg aggregators too, and they are worth a look, though inventory duplicates heavily across all of them.
What None of the Platforms Do Well
Three things, and they are the three that go wrong.
Runway and aircraft matching. Plenty of the destinations worth flying to privately have short or awkward runways. La Mola on Formentera, Megève's altiport at 620 metres up a mountain, Barra's tidal beach. A booking engine will happily quote you an aircraft that cannot land there, or an operator whose crew are not certified for it. We have written about several of these in the Short Hops series precisely because they need a specific aircraft and a specific pilot.
Operator quality below the surface. Every operator on a marketplace is licensed. That is a floor, not a recommendation. Age of the fleet, crew experience on the route, and how they behave when weather closes in are not on the listing.
The total cost. Quotes are usually for the flight. Handling, landing fees, de-icing in winter, overnight crew costs on a there-and-back with a long gap, and catering are frequently extra. Farnborough handling runs a few hundred pounds above Luton on the departure side, which is not decisive against a £15,000 charter but is worth knowing. We break down the full picture in Small Aircraft Charter Cost UK, and which airport to use in Which London Airport Should You Fly Private From.
What We Would Actually Do
Under about £400 a head for a short UK hop, look at Wingly first. It is the only genuinely cheap way to fly privately and there is no equivalent.
For a normal charter on a well-served route, Victor for the first booking so you can see the comparison, then whichever operator you liked, direct, afterwards. Operators quote direct customers competitively and the relationship pays off when you want something unusual.
For anything with a short runway, a difficult airfield, or a schedule that cannot move, use a person rather than a platform. That is the case where knowing which operator to call is worth more than any interface.
Which is, admittedly, what we do — we quote the route across operators, check the aircraft can actually use the airfield, and come back with real options and total costs. From £150 per request, and we will tell you when a platform would serve you better.