London–Paris tops 'empty leg' private jet rankings as SkyAccess data shows discounts of 25–75%

SkyAccess, a US-based private jet booking platform, has ranked London-to-Paris as the most popular international empty-leg private jet corridor. Empty legs are repositioning flights, flown without passengers as an aircraft moves to its next chartered assignment. The ranking excluded US domestic trips, and London, Paris, Geneva and Nice were named among the most active empty-leg destinations over the past year.

SkyAccess said empty-leg passengers can typically secure discounts of between 25 and 75 per cent compared with standard charter prices. The rankings were built from an aggregate of the last 12 months of repositioning legs recorded on SkyAccess's systems, combined with currently listed future flights, and a route qualified only if activity was recorded across at least three distinct months.

Matt Feldon, sales director at Smart Aviation, a European charter operator, told Spear's magazine that the discount figures align with what he currently sees in the market. He also cautioned that empty-leg bookings carry meaningful risks, saying, "It's not as simple as I think some brokers make out." Feldon said clients frequently request empty-leg options, but availability depends entirely on the primary charter flight that immediately precedes or follows the repositioning leg — if those original passengers change or cancel their plans, the empty leg disappears. He added that empty-leg flights remain popular year-round, with summer demand high for the south of France, Spain and Portugal's Algarve region, while Chambery and Sion attract winter ski travellers.

Repositioning flights are a byproduct of how charter aircraft operate: a jet booked one-way must still return or move on to its next assignment, and operators have an incentive to fill that otherwise empty seat capacity at a reduced price rather than fly it empty. Corridors like London-Paris rank highly simply because they sit on busy, high-frequency charter routes where repositioning happens often.

The discount range Feldon confirmed, 25 to 75 per cent, shows why these deals attract price-sensitive private flyers, but Feldon's point about dependency is the structural catch: an empty leg is not a standalone product, it is a derivative of someone else's primary booking. That means availability can vanish if the preceding charter is cancelled or rescheduled, and brokers who present empty legs as dependable inventory are overstating what the data actually supports.

What remains to be seen is whether seasonal demand patterns, the south of France and the Algarve in summer, Chambery and Sion in winter, translate into more predictable empty-leg supply on those specific routes, or whether the underlying unpredictability Feldon describes continues to limit how far operators and platforms can systematize the product.