Opinion

More Charter Inquiries. But Where Is the Business?

RISE Team

11 November 2026 6 min read

US charter demand is up sharply. US charter flying is not. For sales teams heading into the holiday peak, that gap is the story.

More requests feel like more opportunity. Inboxes fill up, quotes go out, and the team is busy from morning to night. But a request is not a booking, and a busy sales desk is not the same as a profitable one. When inquiry volume rises faster than the number of flights actually operated, the real question becomes: which of these requests are worth our time?

What the Numbers Show

According to charter marketplace Avinode, domestic US charter demand grew by 27% between October 2025 and September 2026, as reported by AIN. Over the same period, the number of departures stayed largely steady. Avinode's director of commercial development, Harry Clarke, described actual departures as "pretty flat in the U.S. year over year."

Two other factors are shaping the picture:

More brokers. A growing number of US-based brokers are helping to facilitate travel requests, which adds to the volume reaching operators.

Seasonality. Seasonality remains the largest driver of US demand, and Avinode expects hourly charter rates to hit a record high through the rest of 2026, driven by elevated holiday demand and rising fuel costs.

Put simply: there are more people asking, more intermediaries asking on their behalf, and roughly the same number of aircraft actually taking off.

More Inquiries Do Not Mean More Bookings

When requests grow and departures do not, conversion falls. Some of that is the nature of charter: the same trip is often sent to several operators by several brokers, and some clients are comparing options rather than ready to fly. Some requests simply do not fit any available aircraft.

But every request still lands somewhere. Someone has to read it, check the aircraft, consider positioning, look at crew availability and decide whether to quote. Even a "no" takes time and resources.

This is where the cost hides. A sales team working through a busier inbox in arrival order spends as much attention on low-probability, poor-fit requests as on the ones that could add real revenue. Response times stretch. The best opportunities may get a slower reply than they deserve, and in charter, slow often means lost.

The goal is not to answer more requests. It is to answer the right ones first.

Why the Holiday Season Raises the Stakes

The peak period compresses everything. Request volumes climb, fleets are already heavily committed, and every remaining slot in the schedule becomes more valuable. With rates expected to reach record highs, the difference between a well-chosen booking and a poorly chosen one widens.

Rising fuel costs add another layer. A trip that looks attractive on price can lose its appeal once the positioning legs around it are counted. As we explored in Rising Jet Fuel Prices: Why Every Non-Revenue Leg Matters More, the economics of each request depend on where the aircraft is before and after it.

During the holidays, then, the questions behind every request are sharper:

Does it fit the current schedule, or will it disrupt flights already booked?

How much non-revenue flying does it create?

What is it worth compared with the other requests competing for the same aircraft?

Could a small change elsewhere in the schedule make it work?

Step One: Fit and Value

The first three questions already have answers in the market. Request management tools exist that check incoming requests against the current schedule, identify which ones fit the available aircraft, and prioritize them by potential revenue.

For many operators, this is a meaningful step forward. Instead of working through the inbox in arrival order, sales teams see which requests are feasible and which are worth the most. Poor fits drop down the list. Time goes where it is likely to pay off.

But these tools share a limitation: they evaluate each request against the schedule as it stands. If a request does not fit today's plan, it is scored down or set aside.

That leaves the fourth question unanswered. In a fleet of even a few aircraft, the schedule is not fixed. It is one of many possible arrangements, and a request that looks like a poor fit today may become an excellent one with a different aircraft swap, a reshuffled rotation or a repositioning leg that serves two trips instead of one.

Beyond the Current Schedule: AVISCORE

AVISCORE™ does everything a step-one tool does. It analyzes each incoming request against your schedule, assesses operational fit and ranks requests by commercial value, updated in real time, so your sales team knows where to focus.

Then it goes further. Rather than treating today's schedule as fixed, AVISCORE explores millions of possible schedule combinations and changes to find valuable opportunities that a simple fit check would miss. A request that appears infeasible may become workable, and profitable, once aircraft assignments are rearranged. A trip that seems marginal may turn out to fill a repositioning leg that would otherwise fly empty.

The scale of that search is beyond any sales desk. As we noted in The Scaling Trap in Business Aviation, a fleet of 5 aircraft serving 8 missions a day already has nearly 400,000 raw aircraft-to-mission combinations before constraints are applied. No team can compare those options for every new request, especially in December.

AVISCORE is the only tool exploring the schedule this way. The result is not just a better-sorted inbox, but visibility into business that was hidden inside your own schedule.

The decision stays with your team. AVISCORE surfaces the opportunities; your people bring the client relationships, context and judgment to act on them.

Volume Is Not Value

A 27% rise in charter requests on Avinode with flat departures is a reminder that activity and business are not the same thing. The operators who come out of this holiday season ahead will not be the ones who answered the most requests. They will be the ones who found the right requests, quickly, including those hidden behind a schedule that looked full.

More inquiries are only an opportunity if you can see which ones matter.

to see how AVISCORE finds the valuable business in your request flow.