international hub aircraft brokers
Rocking the world
Chapman Freeborn finds aircraft for everyone from holidaymakers to the Costas to heads of state and rock stars. Group passenger sales director Mark Payne spoke to Gary Noakes
Chapman Freeborn isn’t a household name among travel brands, but it’s been around a good while. What does it do? We’re a global aircraft charter specialist with three divisions: commercial passenger, cargo and our subsidiary companies. We do just over 50,000 contracts a year, many of which are multi-flight. We are privately owned by three individuals, headquartered at Gatwick and have 250 employees worldwide, with big offices in Germany, the US and UAE plus several smaller offices around the globe.
Tell us more about the commercial passenger business. We class anything above 19 passengers as commercial; anything smaller is
executive VIP. We have worked with 150 different carriers this year and in 2017 we flew to more than 650 destinations and did 25,000 airline-to-airline leases. We pride ourselves on our neutrality – the key thing about being a broker is that we can go to the market and find an aircraft for our customer’s needs. It might be a summer series or maybe a travel agent corporate event. It’s not just about holidaymakers travelling from A to B; we cover every aspect of people needing to move.
How important is WTM London to this side of the business? WTM London always creates interesting and diverse chartering enquiries for us. Two years ago we met the chief executive officer of a small Eastern European tour operator at the show. She had always moved passengers by scheduled flights and had never considered chartering a realistic proposition for a company of her size. I think we ended up flying 24 weekly summer charters for her on a European registered A320 at a seat cost well below the scheduled price. That operator has remained a loyal customer ever since. So you never know what will turn up at WTM London. It’s not just about meeting new people on our stand; it’s about meeting our existing clients and friends from the industry as much as anything else. Our business is built on relationships with airlines; it’s something I’m very much involved in and that’s another reason for being at WTM London.
76 wtm insights autumn 2018
On the business travel side, you must also work with travel management companies?
Yes, a key USP is that we are truly 24-hour; clients can get their
flights watched across all time zones whatever time of day. A lot of companies only claim to do this, but we definitely do.
What about the more glamorous side? You’ve been working with the music industry since a 1987 David Bowie tour. Our founder, Chris Chapman, is retired but still very much into the music industry side of the business – a lot of our executive division is dedicated to it. The band will fly on a private jet and our commercial passenger team will move the roadies on a bigger jet. Shifting all the kit crosses into our cargo department as well. We’ve worked with The Rolling Stones, Coldplay and U2 and we also carry a lot of sports teams – Premier League football clubs and ice hockey teams, for example.
This year is your 45th anniversary, where do you go from here? Cargo is our biggest product, with passenger second. We want to see a more even split in our business, so we are pushing our commercial passenger brand. That said, our cargo subsidiary Magma Aviation is also growing – we increased our stake in the company to 75% last year. Magma operates two Boeing 747s and by the time of WTM London there should be a third or fourth.
wtm.com
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