Empty leg alerts: why legs sell fast, and how a route alert catches them

What are empty leg alerts?

An empty leg alert is a standing request that watches a route for you. You say where you want to fly from and to, and when empty legs on that route appear, you get an email. You don't have to search, refresh or remember to check. When something lands in your inbox, you decide whether it suits.

That is all it is, and it is worth being plain about that, because "alerts" can sound grander than they are. On Harbour & Hangar, a route alert does one job: tell us the route and we email you when a matching leg appears. It doesn't reserve a seat, hold a price or guarantee a flight. What it does is solve the one problem that makes empty legs hard to catch, which is timing. (If you're new to the idea, what is an empty leg flight explains where these flights come from.)

Why empty legs sell within a day or two

To see why alerts matter, it helps to see why the inventory behaves the way it does.

They appear late

An empty leg only exists once an operator has confirmed a one-way charter and knows the aircraft has to reposition afterwards. That often isn't settled until shortly before the flight. Most legs surface days to a few weeks before departure, and a typical listing window is just 24–72 hours. There's no timetable to plan around.

They are priced to clear

The operator is going to fly the aircraft anyway. Any fare is better than none, so legs are typically listed at 25–75% below the equivalent charter. A discount that size, on a jet that's leaving regardless, attracts buyers quickly.

Other people are watching too

On the busiest corridors, such as London to Geneva in winter (our private jet hire Geneva page covers that corridor) or London to Ibiza in summer, plenty of travellers are waiting for exactly the same flight. A well-priced leg can be gone within hours of listing.

They vanish when the aircraft moves

The inventory is perishable in the literal sense. Once the departure time passes, the leg is gone for good. And if the original client changes plans, it can disappear even earlier. There is no fake urgency in any of this; the scarcity is real.

Put those together and you get a market where the useful window between a leg appearing and a leg selling is short: often a day or two, sometimes less.

Why a single search usually finds nothing

Most people try empty legs once the way they'd try a flight-comparison site: type in the route, look at the results, and draw a conclusion. With a supply this short-lived, that rarely works. Roughly nineteen times out of twenty, a one-off search returns nothing for the exact route you want, not because legs never fly it, but because you looked in the gap between one leg selling and the next being listed.

The two work together. A search is a snapshot, useful for seeing what's flying and what it costs. An alert is a watch. Our guide to how to find empty legs ranks the methods, and the alert sits at the top for exactly this reason.

How our private jet route alert works

There are three steps, and none of them costs anything.

1. Tell us the route. Where you'd fly from and where you'd fly to, typed as a city or an airport code.
2. Give us your email. That's where matches are sent. There's no membership to join and nothing to pay.
3. We email you when a matching leg appears. When a leg on that route shows up on the live feed, you get an email about it. You look at the date, the aircraft and the price, and decide.

If a leg suits you, you request a confirmed quote, check the terms and book, as set out in how to book an empty leg. If it doesn't, you ignore it and wait for the next one. The alert keeps watching either way.

A few things worth knowing so your expectations are right:

• The alert watches a route, not a date. You'll hear about matching legs on that route whenever they appear, and you choose which dates work. For a traveller with a loose schedule, that's a feature. Our guide to flexible empty leg flights covers how to plan around it.
• An email is not a booking. The leg is still on open sale when you hear about it. If someone else books it first, it's gone.
• Some routes are quiet. Legs cluster on busy corridors. On an unusual pairing, you may wait a long time, and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

What happens behind the scenes

Once your alert is saved, it is checked against the live empty-leg feed, the same feed the boards on this site show, about once an hour. Each matching leg is emailed to you once; you won't get the same leg again on the next check. Legs whose date has already passed are ignored. If you leave the destination box empty, the alert watches every leg leaving your chosen airport, wherever it is going, which suits a traveller who cares more about the date than the destination.

What an empty leg alert email tells you, and what to check

When a match appears, the email lists the leg's route, its date, the aircraft type and the listed price, or "price on request" where the seller hasn't published one. That's enough to decide in a minute whether it's worth a closer look. It isn't enough to book on, and the table below covers what to check next.

The confirmed quote comes from the broker, not from the email. Ask for it as soon as a leg looks right, because the listing stays on open sale until someone books. The booking guide linked above goes through the steps from enquiry to payment.

Worked example: a winter alert from London to Geneva

Here is how an alert plays out on a typical ski-season corridor. The figures are indicative and use the house ranges for this route.

A couple who ski most weekends in the season set an alert from their nearest London airport to Geneva, with a second alert for the return. A full charter on a light or midsize jet from London to Geneva, about an hour and a half in the air, costs roughly £7,000–12,000 one way, including the aircraft's positioning. An empty leg on the same corridor typically lists at around £2,800–6,000 one way, consistent with legs being priced up to 75% below the full charter figure.

• Week one: an email arrives for a leg on a Tuesday. They can't fly midweek, so they ignore it.
• Week three: a Friday leg appears, on an aircraft with enough room for two people and two ski bags. They ask for a confirmed quote within the hour and book it.
• Coming home: no matching return leg appears for the Sunday, so they book a scheduled flight back, or price a one-way charter if they need to.

The outcome is one flight at empty-leg prices out of several emails, which is a realistic hit rate on a busy corridor. On a quiet route the same couple might hear nothing all season. Prices are indicative; the live figure is confirmed on enquiry.

How to get the most from empty leg notifications

An alert is only as useful as the routes it watches and how quickly you act. A few habits make a real difference.

• Set more than one route. If you might fly London to Nice, London to Geneva or London to Palma in the next couple of months, set all three. Most matches you'll pass on; the one that fits is worth the clutter.
• Think in regions. A trip to the Riviera could land at Nice, Cannes or Saint-Tropez. Covering the region rather than one airport widens what you catch. Our empty leg flights UK guide shows which London airports and corridors produce the most legs.
• Be ready to book. Have passenger names, passport details and payment to hand before the email arrives. On a popular corridor, the difference between booking and missing out can be a few hours.
• Keep it running after you book. Empty legs are occasionally cancelled when the original charter changes. If yours falls through, a live alert means the next match reaches you straight away, as our guide to an empty leg cancelled or delayed explains.
• Check the aircraft, not just the price. You don't choose the jet on an empty leg. Make sure it seats your group and takes your bags before you get excited.

Which routes produce the most empty leg alerts?

An alert can only report legs that exist, so it pays to know where they cluster. Empty legs follow demand: wherever lots of one-way charters fly in one direction, aircraft have to come back the other way, often empty.

• The Alps in winter. Ski weekends and school holidays send aircraft from London and other European cities into Geneva and the smaller Alpine airfields, and many of them fly home empty once the passengers are dropped off. The return direction, away from the mountains, is often where legs appear.
• The Mediterranean in summer. Nice, Ibiza, Palma, Olbia and the Greek islands pull in heavy one-way traffic from late spring to early autumn. Repositioning flights back to London and northern Europe are common, especially at the start of the week after a busy weekend.
• Big events. A grand prix, a film festival or a major final concentrates arrivals in a few days and departures in a few more. The flights that bring guests in usually leave empty, and the ones that collect them often arrive empty.
• Busy business corridors. Routes between London, Paris, Geneva and Zurich see steady traffic all year, so legs turn up outside the holiday peaks too.

The practical lesson: set your alert in the direction the crowds are leaving, not the direction they are heading. If you can travel against the flow, for example flying out to the Riviera at the end of the summer season, you are far more likely to get a match than someone trying to go the same way as everyone else on the busiest weekend of the year.

Quieter routes still get legs, just less often. If your route is unusual, pair a specific alert with a broader one, such as every leg leaving your nearest airport with the destination left blank, and see what turns up.

Empty leg flight alerts vs apps and memberships

Plenty of companies offer some form of empty leg flight alerts. The differences are worth understanding before you sign up to anything.

Operator and broker apps usually show one company's own aircraft, or the legs it has chosen to list. They can be good, but they only see part of the market.

Membership schemes sometimes promise a feed of cheap flights for an annual fee. Be careful here. Supply is unpredictable, and nobody can promise a steady stream of cheap legs on your route. A fixed daily feed of bargains is usually a way of selling the membership, not the flights.

A route alert from a marketplace watches the legs listed across the global empty-leg marketplace for the route you choose, and costs nothing. It can't make legs appear that don't exist, but it does make sure you hear about the ones that do. Our comparison of empty leg apps and marketplaces goes through the options in more detail, and our honest review of the empty leg marketplace covers what booking through it is like.

Is an alert worth setting up?

If there's a route you'd fly in the next few weeks or months, and you have some give on the date, yes. It takes a minute and costs nothing, and it's the only method that keeps watching when you aren't.

Honestly, empty leg alerts aren't worth much in a few situations, and it is better to know that before you set one.

• Fixed dates with no slack. If the trip can't move by a day, an alert is a gamble rather than a plan.
• Routes nobody flies. An unusual pairing between two small airfields may never produce a match. Watch the nearest busy airport instead, or accept that a charter is the answer.
• A group that needs a particular aircraft. If you need eight seats and a big hold, most legs on your route will be the wrong size.
• When you can't act quickly. If you need days to get sign-off from a group, a good leg will usually have sold by the time you agree.

If your trip is on a fixed date that can't move, an alert is less useful for that trip. You'd be better off pricing a charter now and leaving an alert running for the return, where you might have more flexibility. And if you're a solo traveller looking for the cheapest way from A to B, an empty leg rarely beats a commercial fare, alert or no alert, because you're paying for the whole aircraft.

Frequently asked questions