Air Charter Service Wins Customer Service Award at UK Aviation Industry Awards
Why It MattersThe case shows charter brokers increasingly competing on retention and service infrastructure rather than price alone as private jet customer loyalty comes under pressure.
What happened
Charter broker Air Charter Service has won a customer service award at the Aviation Industry Awards UK, a sponsorship-funded programme recognising excellence across the UK aviation industry. The award was presented at a gala ceremony held on September 22 at the Park Plaza London Riverbank hotel.
Jessie Howes, Director of Luxury Travel at Air Charter Service, accepted the award on behalf of the company. "We are delighted to have won this award," Howes said in a press release, adding that customer service "has been our core differentiator since the company was founded more than 35 years ago." Howes said the company had invested in what it describes as a "customer service ecosystem" combining technology, training, process, and staff, including a team of flight representatives and a dedicated customer experience department.
In its contest entry, Air Charter Service stated that private jet customer retention levels in the UK had been declining, which prompted the initiative. The company said it "set about creating a customer service ecosystem to increase the level of feedback" received from passengers and to "identify and solve as many issues as possible to regrow returning customer rates."
Industry impact & what to watch
Awards programmes like this one give charter brokers a public marker for a part of the business — retention and service quality — that is otherwise hard for customers to compare across operators before they book. Air Charter Service's own framing of the entry, tying the initiative directly to declining retention rates, is notable because it ties a marketing win to an operational problem the company says it was already trying to solve.
Charter brokerage margins depend heavily on repeat bookings rather than one-off flights, since acquiring a new private jet customer is costlier than retaining an existing one. Building dedicated customer experience teams and structured feedback loops, as described here, is one way brokers try to shift that balance without competing purely on price.
Whether the ecosystem Howes described actually reverses the retention decline the company cited is not something this recognition settles — that would show up in future retention figures the company has not yet published.
