James has covered business aviation and high-end travel for over a decade, writing on route economics, FBO operations, and the infrastructure behind the private jet market. He is based between London and Madrid.
A plain-language explainer on repositioning flights, the real probability of securing one, and how the LON to IBZ corridor compares for frequency.
The term empty leg is used often and understood less well than it should be. It sits in the public imagination somewhere between a free flight and a discount mystery, promoted on social media by accounts that understand its appeal better than its mechanics. The mechanics, once explained, reveal why empty legs are genuinely useful for some passengers on some days, and largely irrelevant for most passengers on most days.
Where the empty leg comes from
A private jet operates on a one-charter-at-a-time basis, unlike a commercial aircraft running a scheduled timetable. When a client books an aircraft to fly from Farnborough to Ibiza on a Friday, the operator must then position that aircraft back. If the operator has another booking waiting in Ibiza, the repositioning is covered. If not, the aircraft flies back empty, burning fuel and accruing crew duty time with no revenue to offset either.
That return flight is the empty leg. The operator would rather sell it at almost any price than fly it empty, and so a rate is offered, typically fifty to seventy percent below what the same routing would cost as a full charter booking. On a twenty thousand euro leg, the empty rate might come in at eight or nine thousand.
The LON to IBZ corridor and empty leg frequency
The corridor generates empty legs with reasonable regularity in season, and almost none out of season. The logic follows directly from the demand pattern. When the bulk of charter traffic is heading from London to Ibiza on Fridays and back on Sundays, the Ibiza-to-London return on a Friday becomes an empty leg opportunity, and the London-to-Ibiza inbound on a Sunday becomes another.
For a passenger who genuinely wants to fly from Ibiza back to London on a Friday morning, the market is in their favour. For a passenger who wants to fly from London to Ibiza on a Friday afternoon, the empty leg on that routing will be rarer, because most of the fleet that generated an empty outbound will be selling it as a full charter in the other direction.
The empty leg that everyone wants to find is the one flowing in the same direction as demand. It tends not to exist, for the straightforward reason that it would have been sold as a full charter.
What the trade-offs actually look like
An empty leg comes with constraints that a conventional charter does not. The route is fixed: the aircraft needs to go from A to B, and the client must go with it. The timing is set by the operator's schedule, not the client's preference. The notice period is frequently short, because the empty leg only becomes available when the original client confirms their booking or when a repositioning arrangement falls through.
For a client with a fixed itinerary and a fixed departure window, an empty leg will almost never align. For a client who can genuinely move their dates by twenty four or forty eight hours, and who is travelling on a route that the corridor generates regularly, there is a real opportunity.
How to actually access them
Empty legs are offered through broker networks, sometimes through operator direct sales, and increasingly through digital platforms that aggregate availability. The aggregators are useful for awareness but less useful for execution: the best empty legs on the most popular routes are often spoken for before they appear on a public platform, because the broker who arranged the original charter gets the first call.
The most reliable way to access empty legs on the London to Ibiza private jet charter corridor is to work with an audited partner broker who handles significant volume on the route. They will know which operators have legs coming back, they will have existing relationships that give them advance notice, and they will be able to structure a booking that protects the client against the most common empty leg failure mode: the original charter being cancelled, which removes the empty leg from the market entirely.
The honest answer
An empty leg is a real discount on a real aircraft. It is not a bargain in the same sense as a sale fare, because the conditions that produce the discount also remove the flexibility that most private aviation clients are paying for. For the right passenger on the right day, it is a useful tool. For the client who wants to fly on a Friday afternoon from London to Ibiza in August on a specific aircraft with a specific schedule, the honest broker will suggest a full charter, because that is the product that actually delivers what the client wants.
