Charter Exec Urges Operators To Prep for AI

The charter industry is on the precipice of a major change as artificial intelligence (AI) matures, a key industry executive maintained, encouraging executives to prepare for this technology.

Speaking during the recent National Air Transportation Association Aviation Business Conference in Dallas, Greg Johnson, president and CEO of aviation payment platform Tuvoli and longtime industry executive, noted swings in the market in 2025 with a slow beginning and stabilized ending. “But there is a bigger shift that I see happening in the market. And I truly think that an awful lot of folks in our industry are discounting the impact that is going to happen in a pretty short period of time as AI becomes more prevalent in the market.”

He noted that some 25 years ago, the industry primarily used the Yellow Pages for advertising, and potential clients would call seeking trip possibilities. “And then the internet came along and all of a sudden, somebody that was in New York City or anywhere could put a website up and get charter leads from everywhere, and it changed the whole game, right?”

This created an entire “sub-industry,” Johnson maintained: If an operator didn’t have an aircraft available, brokers could reach out to other operators to find one via the internet. “While travel agencies got disrupted and disintermediated on the airline side by the web, the opposite happened in the charter market, and it’s been one of the biggest shifts in our industry in our lifetime,” he recalled.

Having said that, Johnson predicted that the changes coming with AI “are going to be at least that big if not bigger. And it’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out, because at this point it’s unwritten and it could go a number of different ways,” he said.

While AI can’t replace personal relationships, and that matters in the charter market, it can satisfy many. “It makes me feel comfortable that those relationships are still going to matter. But relationships mattered before the internet, too. And I bet that back then, people were going, ‘Nobody’s going to go to a broker because they know me. They use the Yellow Pages.’ And yet, guess what? Brokers ended up dominating the market,” he said, estimating that 80% of all private jet flights today are booked through a broker and not direct with a charter operator.

Brokers can provide “one-stop shopping. Certainly, relationships matter, but we have to be very careful to use that as an excuse for not leaning in and thinking hard about what’s going to happen with AI.”

He gave an example, noting that he experimented by shopping for a charter flight with ChatGPT. He asked for the best private jet option for a flight from Boston to Miami the following Wednesday. ChatGPT came up with multiple considerations: “It said, ‘Okay, we’re considering flight options for four passengers. A midsize like the [Textron Aviation Cessna] Citation XLS would be a good fit. A [Bombardier] Challenger 300 would be better if it’s a larger group.’ And it says, ‘I’m going figure out the distance from Boston to Miami. I’m going to look for charter plane pricing.’ It went to at least 12 websites, it estimated the flight time, and then it said, ‘I think I should serve up two options—a midsize option and a super mid option.’ It took 26 seconds to go through all of that.”

Another of the responses that struck Johnson was that it shopped the best airports. “It didn’t say, ‘Let’s go Boston Logan to Miami International.’” It recommended a midsize to ensure the flight would be nonstop on the basis of 3.3 hours trip time. “If you look into details, it actually said it's less than that, but we got to factor climb and descent into the flight time. It was actually thinking about this, and then it came up with reasonably good ballpark price estimates.” Then it went further to suggest that if the passengers have a lot of baggage, such as golf clubs, they may want the Challenger 300 or 350 and ballparked those prices.

“Some of the charter brokers I know wouldn’t think about all the things that [ChatGPT’s] already thought about. An experienced broker, yes, but at some of the firms that just have guys at the end of a phone, they may not pick the best airports, they aren’t thinking about luggage,” Johnson said. “So, what really blew me away at the end of this [is] that AI is at its absolute infant stage. It’s in diapers in terms of what it’s going to do.”

He questioned if this is the capability of AI right now, how long would it be before customers turn to it for their charter needs? “Whether you like it or not, the charter customer in their own quest for efficiency is going to start using AI to talk to those of you who are selling your charter. And your salespeople are going to be on the receiving end of AI-based requests. And if you think the brokers aren’t also going to try and figure out how to make supply sourcing easier, I would tell you, there’s no question that brokers are also going to figure out how to supply source through AI. So, it’s coming whether you like it or not.”

Johnson added that this would happen faster than many may want to believe, noting that a multitude of data centers are not yet built. Already, mortgages are being sold through AI, he said. “Those aren’t exactly charter, but there’s operational complexity and sort of relationship complexity in both of those businesses,” Johnson pointed out. “In the very near future, folks who want to lean in are going to be able to deploy agents on the lower end of the charter market. Who knows where this whole thing is going to go, but there’s, in my mind, no question, and all this stuff is going to evolve.”

Johnson predicted that quote requests would jump as a result, and the detailed questions even more so. “If the process that you have to quote your fleet is as manual as it is today for virtually every operator that I talk to, I think it’s going to be harder and harder to compete because you’re going to be trying to triage who you do business with,” he warned attendees at the NATA conference.

Operators unable to respond to the quotes will lag. Operators will need to respond to quote requests as quickly as possible. That is where the industry “truly needs to go,” he said. Personnel will become a critical factor because ChatGPT can do the job of a junior charter broker pretty effectively already. “Within a year or two, I think you’re going to see agents that are going to blow everybody away. If you haven’t really been thinking about how you’re going to deploy AI in your business, I would strongly encourage you to put a little effort into it.”