Charter vs. scheduled flights: differences, history and today’s leisure airlines

On a Saturday morning in peak season, holiday jets taxi to the runway every few minutes in Düsseldorf, Hanover or Nuremberg – and somebody at the fence is guaranteed to say: “Here come the charters.” That’s not entirely wrong, but it’s no longer entirely right either. For decades, charter flights and scheduled flights were two strictly separate worlds with their own rules, their own airlines and their own fares. Today, most leisure airlines are legally scheduled airlines, while real charter mostly happens where you don’t expect it. This article explains the difference, the history behind it and what it means for your sightings.

Charter flight and scheduled flight: the short answer

A scheduled flight takes place regularly on a fixed route to a published timetable, and anyone can buy a seat. A charter flight – in official German terms “Bedarfsluftverkehr” (on-demand air traffic), internationally “non-scheduled” – is ordered by a customer instead. The customer hires the aircraft in whole or in part and decides who flies along or to whom the seats are sold.

In German law, the definition is in the Luftverkehrsgesetz (Air Traffic Act): under Section 21 LuftVG, scheduled service is the commercial, public and regular carriage on specific routes. For this, the law provides a special scheduled-service license; for airlines with an EU operating license, European market rules now take precedence within the EU. The airline must make its timetable, fares and conditions of carriage public, and in principle it must carry anyone who books on those terms. These very obligations are missing with charter: there, you have a contract between airline and customer, not a public timetable.

The differences at a glance

On the apron, both kinds of flight look the same: same aircraft, same handling, same safety rules. The differences lie in the business model and the license.

Feature	Scheduled flight	Charter flight
Timetable	published, regular	as the customer requires
Sales	public, to anyone	to the customer, who allocates or resells the seats
License	scheduled-service license, formerly route rights from agreements	single or series license, depending on country and route
Price	published fares	hire price for the whole aircraft or a block of seats
Typical customers	business and leisure travelers, connecting passengers	tour operators, clubs, companies, military, cruise lines
Load factor risk	borne by the airline	borne mostly by the customer

The last point explains why charter used to be so cheap: the tour operator bought a whole aircraft or a fixed block of seats and filled it with its own customers. The airline flew practically fully booked and could calculate accordingly tightly. A scheduled airline, by contrast, also had to offer flights that were only half full.

The main types of charter

• Ad hoc charter: one-off hire for a specific occasion – the original form of charter.
• Package holiday charter (IT charter): A tour operator buys seats as a building block of a package holiday. If it hires the entire aircraft, that’s called a full charter; if several operators share one aircraft, a part or split charter.
• Series charter: the same route over a whole season in a fixed rhythm, such as every Saturday – in operation hardly distinguishable from a scheduled service.
• Group charter: flights for clubs, pilgrim groups or fan clubs.
• Military and government charter: Armed forces hire civilian aircraft for troops and materiel.
• Cargo charter: individual or contractually bound freight flights.
• Subcharter: An airline has one of its own flights operated by another company, usually in case of a cancellation or capacity shortage.

Why charter existed in the first place

Air traffic after the Second World War was strictly regulated. The 1944 Chicago Convention distinguishes between scheduled and non-scheduled traffic: for scheduled flights into another country, an airline needs special permission from the destination state, in practice through bilateral air service agreements. These agreements often specified which airline could serve which route and how often. Scheduled airlines agreed fares among themselves within IATA. Flying was accordingly expensive and an exception for most people.

On-demand traffic ran alongside this system. Charter flights made it possible to offer trips that weren’t bound to IATA fares – but only under conditions. One of the pioneers of the flight package holiday is considered to be the Briton Vladimir Raitz, whose company Horizon Holidays took vacationers to Corsica on a Douglas DC-3 around 1950. Flight, accommodation and meals came at an all-in price well below a regular scheduled ticket. The principle caught on: tour operators bought whole aircraft, added hotel and transfer and sold the bundle as a package holiday.

Many European scheduled airlines founded their own charter subsidiaries in this period. For Lufthansa, that role was taken by Deutsche Flugdienst GmbH, founded in December 1955 by Lufthansa, two shipping companies and the federal railway (Bundesbahn). From March 1956 it flew to tourist destinations, and in 1961 it took over Condor-Luftreederei and was henceforth called Condor Flugdienst – today’s Condor. Almost at the same time, Lufttransport-Union was founded in 1955, later LTU of Düsseldorf.

The golden years of charter airlines

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, holiday flying in Europe grew enormously. Mallorca, the Canary Islands, Greece and later Turkey became mass destinations. In Britain, carriers such as Britannia Airways, Dan-Air and Monarch emerged, in Scandinavia Sterling, in Belgium Sobelair. In Germany, besides Condor and LTU, Hapag-Lloyd Flug, which started in 1973 with a Boeing 727 from Hamburg to Ibiza, Aero Lloyd and Germania were among those flying.

Air Berlin also began as a charter airline: in 1979, the company first flew vacationers from West Berlin to Mallorca. Because only Allied airlines were allowed to land in divided Berlin, it was initially founded as an American company – a story that shows how strongly politics shaped air traffic back then.

A typical trick of the 1980s was the so-called camping flight. Operators sold leftover seats without a hotel but enclosed a symbolic accommodation voucher so that the flight formally counted as a package holiday. From this gray area, the fully official flight-only later emerged.

In the US, development went differently. There, so-called supplemental airlines were only allowed to offer charter to a limited extent, which gave rise to travel clubs as a workaround. With the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, most restrictions fell away. Carriers such as World Airways or ATA moved between charter and scheduled service afterward, and pioneers such as People Express showed how low fares can work in scheduled traffic. You can read more about this line of development in the article on the low-cost carrier business model.

Deregulation blurs the line

In Europe, the market opened in three steps. The first liberalization package of 1987 and the second of 1990 relaxed the rules for fares and capacity. The third package of 1992 largely lifted the remaining restrictions for European airlines within the Community: they were allowed to set their fares freely and to serve routes between EU states without a separate route license. It took effect from 1993, with domestic flights in other member states added in 1997. Today, Regulation (EC) No. 1008/2008 bundles these rules.

With that, charter lost its most important advantage within Europe. If every airline with an EU operating license may offer any route at any price, there’s no longer a reason to squeeze vacation flights into a package-holiday corset. Many former charter airlines switched to scheduled service and sold individual tickets through their own websites. At the same time, low-cost carriers such as Ryanair and easyJet emerged, appealing to exactly the customers who used to buy flight-only seats.

For the classic leisure airlines, a period of consolidation began. Tour operators and airlines grew together into integrated travel groups that ran hotels, distribution and flights under one roof. From Hapag-Lloyd Flug, Britannia and other companies, the TUI airlines emerged; from 1997, Condor gradually became part of what would later be the Thomas Cook group. Others disappeared: LTU went to Air Berlin in 2007, the brand vanished in 2009, and Air Berlin itself ceased operations in 2017.

What happened in 2019

The downside of the integrated model showed on September 23, 2019. On that day, the British travel group Thomas Cook filed for insolvency, and Thomas Cook Airlines ceased flight operations immediately. In Britain, tens of thousands of vacationers had to be brought home in a government-organized repatriation operation.

Condor, then part of the group, kept flying. The airline received a state-guaranteed bridge loan, entered protective shield proceedings (a German court-supervised restructuring procedure) and in 2021 was taken over by a majority stake of the financial investor Attestor. The case showed how closely leisure airlines and tour operators are intertwined – and why insolvency protection for package holidays plays such a big role in the EU today.

Leisure airlines today: scheduled with a vacation profile

When people talk about “charter” today, they almost always mean leisure airlines. Legally, most of them operate scheduled services: they publish seasonal timetables, sell individual tickets and use the same booking systems as network airlines. Their profile still differs clearly.

• Destinations: sun, beach and cities on the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands, in Egypt and, on long-haul routes, to the Caribbean, Africa or North America.
• Rhythm: strong seasonal peaks, with a focus on weekends and the start of school holidays. More in the guide School holidays and public holidays.
• Sales: a large share of the seats still goes to tour operators in blocks, while the rest is sold individually.
• Fleet: mostly high-capacity medium-haul jets such as the Boeing 737-800 or the A321neo, and widebodies on long-haul.

In the German-speaking region, these include Condor, TUIfly, Discover Airlines from the Lufthansa Group, SunExpress as a joint venture of Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines, Edelweiss from Zurich and Marabu from Condor’s orbit. Foreign leisure airlines such as Corendon, Smartwings, Jet2 or TUI Airways come on top. As of October 2026, the fleets and bases of these airlines keep changing – details are in the respective profiles.

Where real charter still happens today

Away from the leisure airlines, classic on-demand traffic still exists – and it provides many of the movements that cause excitement at the fence.

• Sports: Soccer clubs, national teams and teams in other sports often fly to away games on hired aircraft. In the US, airlines such as Miami Air used to specialize in exactly that.
• Military and government: Civilian airlines such as Omni Air International fly troops and materiel on behalf of armed forces.
• Cruises and round trips: Shipping lines and specialist operators hire aircraft to bring passengers to the port or to exclusive destinations.
• Companies and events: Trade shows, concerts and business trips fill entire aircraft.
• Subcharter and wet lease: If an aircraft drops out, another airline steps in. How this works contractually is explained in the article Wet lease, ACMI and dry lease.

How to recognize a charter as a spotter

You can’t see the difference on the aircraft itself. The clues are in the data around it.

If you want to experience the big holiday waves, it’s worth looking at the vacation airports at the other end of the route. At Palma de Mallorca Airport or in Antalya, you see leisure airlines from half of Europe on a summer day. Tips for the island are in the guide Plane spotting in Mallorca. At home, the Düsseldorf observation deck is a good place to watch the Saturday wave. When the season changes and which routes then drop out is explained in the article on the summer and winter timetable.

Conclusion

For decades, the difference between charter and scheduled flights was a matter of laws, agreements and fare cartels. Charter made flying affordable for broad sections of the public and let airlines of its own such as Condor, LTU or Britannia grow big. Since deregulation, most leisure airlines are legally scheduled airlines with a vacation profile, and the term “charter” lives on mainly in everyday speech. Real on-demand flights still exist, though – and for spotters, they are among the highlights.