Setting your first charter rates as a new operator

A new operator has no flown history to price from and has to publish something anyway. Most build the first rate from the wrong reference, and the wrong reference is hard to walk back once counterparties have seen it.

What to build it from

Your own direct cost per hour, honestly assembled. Fuel, landing and handling, hourly maintenance reserves, crew cost per flight. The reserves are the line most often left out and the one that makes the whole number wrong.

Plus a contribution to fixed costs, sized against the utilisation you actually expect in year one rather than the one you hope for.

Then sense-check against the market, which is a check rather than a starting point. A rate built from the market and reverse-engineered into costs tells you nothing about whether you can survive at it. We show a "from" price per route; the final fare depends on the date, the group and the baggage, and is confirmed in writing before booking.

The two anchors that mislead

What a competitor charges. You do not know their cost base, their aircraft's condition, their finance arrangement or whether they are pricing sustainably. Matching a number whose basis you cannot see is copying somebody's homework without knowing if they passed.

And what a passenger says they expected. Expectation is not information about cost. It is information about what they read somewhere.

Both anchors share a defect worth naming: they tell you what a number should look like, not whether you can fly at it. A rate you cannot sustain wins work for one season and loses the aircraft in the second, and the counterparties who came for the number do not follow you up when you correct it.

Price the day, not the leg

This is the decision hardest to reverse.

A Quepos hop at 33.4 nautical miles quoted as a short leg looks competitive and consumes a day when the waiting and the return are counted. We quote waiting time and aircraft overnights at the destination: tell us whether you return the same day or the aircraft waits, and we include it in the price. An operator who establishes leg pricing early spends years trying to move counterparties onto day pricing, and they resist because the first number was better for them.

Start with the day as the unit where the work genuinely occupies one, and be explicit about which jobs are which.

What to state alongside the number

What is included, even where obvious. The waiting rule. The baggage limit in pieces and dimensions. And validity.

A rate without these is not a price; it is an opening position, and the negotiation that follows happens on ground you chose badly.

The discount that costs most

The introductory rate to a counterparty who will keep asking for it.

A lodge given a first-booking rate will reference it forever, and the second booking arrives with the expectation attached. If you want to win the first one cheaply, make the reason explicit and temporary in writing — a stated introductory period is recoverable, a quiet discount is not. The operator is paid the full flight at their usual rate: our intermediation is not deducted from what they charge.

When to revise

After a full season, not a quarter. One quarter contains too few jobs and too much seasonality to tell you anything.

And revise on your cost data rather than on how busy you felt. A Drake Bay run at 83.5 nautical miles flown thirty times gives you a real contribution figure, and that figure is what a second-year rate should be built from. Operators we bring on evidence current certification, insurance and fleet documentation before receiving a first assignment.

Frequently asked questions

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See also: Pricing a quote · First year realistic plan · Incremental revenue math · For operators · When and how to raise rates