How an empty leg is priced, and when it is a bad deal

Where the discount comes from

Start from the operator's side. A customer has paid for a flight from Nice back to Amsterdam next Sunday. To fly it, the aircraft must first get to Nice, and it will do that on Saturday with nobody on board. That Saturday flight — a positioning flight — is already funded by the Sunday customer's price.

So on Saturday the operator has a jet flying Amsterdam to Nice, fully crewed and fuelled, earning nothing. Anything a second customer pays for the seats is almost entirely profit. There is no cost to recover, only the modest extra of carrying people and bags and a little more fuel to lift them. That is why discounts of up to about 75% appear in the market and why they are commercially sensible rather than a favour.

What sets the exact figure

• Time to departure. A week out, the operator still hopes for a full-price buyer and prices the leg accordingly. The day before, hope is gone and the price follows. Discounts deepen as the clock runs down.
• Route popularity. Amsterdam to Nice on a Friday has many possible buyers, so it sells earlier and shallower. A leg to a quiet field on a Tuesday may go for very little, if anyone wants it at all.
• Aircraft size. A large cabin flying empty is a larger loss to avoid, so the absolute discount is bigger even when the percentage is similar.
• Operator policy. Some operators price aggressively to fill legs; some hold a floor to protect their normal rates. The same leg can be offered at different prices by different brokers for this reason alone.

The arithmetic on a real sector

Take Amsterdam to Nice in a midsize jet, 1h 50m block time in our flight-time model. At published 2026 European rates of €5,500 to €8,500 per hour plus the usual 20–40% trip costs, a normal one-way charter lands somewhere around €12,100 to €21,800. The same flight as an empty leg:

At 75% off, a midsize jet to the Côte d'Azur costs about what four business-class tickets do. That is the appeal, and it is real. What the table cannot show is the other column: the probability that the flight happens at all.

The condition the price does not show

The empty leg exists because of somebody else's booking. If that customer moves their Sunday flight to Monday, changes the airport, or is upgraded to a different aircraft, the Saturday positioning flight moves, changes or disappears with it. Your booking goes with it. This can happen days out or hours out, and most empty-leg terms allow the operator to do it without penalty and without an obligation to find you an alternative.

The same applies if the aircraft goes technical. A normal charter contract usually obliges the operator to source a replacement. An empty-leg contract usually does not.

This is not a reason to avoid empty legs. It is the reason they are cheap, stated precisely. The price is a discount for accepting that risk, and the question is only whether your trip can absorb it.

The empty leg that is not one

Three things turn an empty leg back into a normal charter, and each is a common disappointment.

• Changing the time. If the aircraft was leaving at 10:00 and you want 14:00, it now waits four hours it was not going to wait. Waiting is charged.
• Changing the airport. Rotterdam instead of Schiphol means a flight the aircraft was not going to make. That flight is charged at full rate, and the discount usually goes with it.
• Needing to come back. Empty legs are one-way by nature. The return is a separate purchase, and unless another empty leg happens to line up, it is a normal charter with its own positioning. A "75% off" outbound paired with a full-price return is not 75% off the trip; see the return leg for the three ways a return is priced.

Not the same as a shared flight

An empty leg sells the whole aircraft; a shared or semi-private flight sells you a seat next to other passengers, on a scheduled corridor with its own booking window. The two are routinely advertised with the same phrase and they suit different parties — one or two people versus four or more. The comparison sets out which is which.

When it is a bad deal

An empty leg is a bad deal when the trip cannot tolerate cancellation: a wedding, a board meeting, a connection to a scheduled flight. It is a bad deal when the return has to be bought at full price and the outbound saving is smaller than that return's positioning. And it is a bad deal when you have already changed the time and the airport, because by then you are paying a charter price for empty-leg conditions.

It is a good deal when your dates are genuinely loose, the route already matches, and missing the flight would be an inconvenience rather than a crisis. Those conditions describe a real and reasonably common kind of trip. For everything else, a normal quote — which you can request in a minute — buys certainty, and certainty is what the discount was selling.