Nearly half of business aircraft charter flights are booked within two days of departure, according to Avinode’s analysis of 18,000 trips over the past 12 months using the company’s SchedAero system. In fact, it found that 19 percent of the trips are booked the day of travel, while 20 percent are scheduled just one day in advance.

Avinode discovered that 80 percent of departing flights were quoted within the previous 48 hours, and 90 percent were quoted within the previous five days. Simply, operators who do not provide customer charter quotes within 48 hours face the prospect that 80 percent of these trips are already booked before they even respond, the company said.

It also found that 75 percent of air charter trips departing in the next seven days “do not exist as requests yet,” and “scheduling more than three days in advance is only 40 percent accurate.”

“We were surprised by just how fast-moving a lot of our bookings are,” said SchedAero business manager Johan Sjoberg. “Flight requests are often short notice in the business aviation world, but we didn’t realize that in some cases a matter of hours can make all the difference. If companies don’t have a quick enough process to quote a trip request, the flight will often have already departed.”