What are the particularities of a charter flight?

Unlike regular airlines, charter airlines do not offer their services to individual customers. Instead, the charter airline hires flights to tour operators which integrate them into travel packages. These packages include everything that you need for your perfect holiday: starting from hotel accomodation and not ending with flights to and from your holiday destination. Traditionally, travel packages have been sold at travel agencies, but an ever greater share of holiday arrangements is now sold via the internet, allowing customers to compare a near indefinite number of offers. While classical charter flights used to be offered only in holiday packages, tour operators have begun to offer “flight-only packages” in recent years, which include just the ticket for a chartered flight, allowing tour operators to sell otherwise unused seats in the event that not all packages have been sold out. For their chartered flights, tour operators need to reach a near 100% seat occupancy rate in order to be able to sell seats at a lower rate than regular airlines. The advantages for the customers include a generally lower fare (as compared to regular airline fares), and destinations that are in many cases not served by regular airlines. With the boom of tourism since the 1980s, charter flights became such an attractive business, that many regular carriers have either set up their own charter airlines or acquired existing ones.