What does going the ‘extra mile’ actually mean in charter? | Corporate Jet Investor | CJI news
365 Aviation co-founder and CEO Chris Tofts has built a charter brokerage operation around a hospitality-first philosophy that treats private aviation less as a transportation product and more as an extension of five-star hotel service. The London-based company deploys what it calls "flight riders" — detailed checklists running two to three pages — for its most demanding clients, covering everything from cabin temperature and music preferences to the minimum thread count of bed linens. Tofts, whose career began at Gleneagles Hotel before a mid-1990s pivot into ground handling at Heathrow, Luton, and Stansted, credits his hospitality background as the formative influence on how 365 Aviation approaches client relationships. Legendary anecdotes in the company's history include sourcing off-season Harrods cherries at £150 per punnet, arranging a dress designer flight to save a remote wedding, and recruiting a masseuse from a shopping mall who then traveled the world on a client's jet for 18 months.
For working charter operators and business aviation crews, the flight rider model described by Tofts represents a growing operational expectation in the ultra-high-net-worth segment of Part 91 and commercial charter flying. When a broker transmits a multi-page preference document to an operator, it functions as a binding service specification that goes well beyond standard trip sheets. Crew members and trip support teams on these flights must integrate client-specific requirements — cabin configuration, provisioning standards, arrival ambiance details — into pre-departure checklists alongside standard airmanship items. The comment from Tofts that operators sometimes receive these riders with disbelief reflects a persistent gap between the operational culture of flight departments and the service expectations being set at the broker level, a friction point that becomes acute on short-notice bookings.
The charter brokerage industry has been moving toward this concierge-intensive model for over a decade, driven by competition for repeat business among ultra-high-net-worth clients who have multiple fractional, charter, and whole-aircraft ownership options available to them. Brokerages that differentiate on service depth rather than fleet access or price are effectively commoditizing the aircraft itself while competing on the quality of the surrounding experience. This dynamic puts pressure on operators, ground handlers, and FBOs to function as seamless extensions of a broker's service promise — a relationship that requires clear communication protocols and, increasingly, standardized preference data that can travel with the client across different tail numbers and operators.
Tofts' career arc from hotel management through ground handling and into charter brokerage also illustrates a broader recruitment and leadership pattern in business aviation, where hospitality and service-industry professionals have become influential figures precisely because they import client-management frameworks that aviation historically underemphasized. His 15-year tenure building 365 Aviation and his stated challenge of transitioning from hands-on operator to strategic leader is a tension familiar to founders across the charter sector, where personal relationships and institutional knowledge of client preferences are often concentrated in senior leadership rather than distributed across the organization. The flight rider system itself appears to be one mechanism Tofts has developed to codify and transfer that institutional knowledge — converting what would otherwise be tacit, relationship-based understanding into documented operational standards that can survive organizational scaling.
