Air Charter Service gears up for Euros following group stage draw

Following Saturday’s Euro 2024 draw, leading aircraft charter specialist, Air Charter Service, is expecting an extremely busy tournament for charter flights into Germany next summer and has already received some requests from several nations.

Alex Sadat-Shafai, Global Football Director at ACS, commented: “This is the first men’s football tournament since 2018 where we expect a lot of charter flight activity, following the delayed Euro 2020 tournament and the World Cup in Qatar. International travel had not fully recovered by the time the rescheduled Euros took place in the summer of 2021 and with the World Cup in Qatar, all bar one of the stadiums were in Doha, meaning that there was very little need for aircraft charters.

“However this Euros will be different to those tournaments, with Germany being so central to all the countries taking part. Its location makes corporate day trips possible – flying to Germany in the morning, watching the match and then either an overnight stay, or coming home in the evening. We are sure to see chartered flights for the national Football Associations, sponsors, the media and fans as well. And we also expect some of the teams themselves to make use of charters during the tournament, taking a ‘team plane’ rather than the traditional ‘team bus’. Although all the matches are in the same country, for some nations, consecutive group games are more than 300 miles apart, pairing cities such as Berlin and Gelsenkirchen together and Munich with Cologne.

Obviously, Germany is no stranger to hosting a major tournament and nine of the 10 stadiums being used next year hosted World Cup games in 2006. For that tournament we leased a Dornier 328 for the month, as well as chartering everything from a 19-seater Metroliner to the much larger Boeing 757. In the 2018 World Cup we arranged more than 350 flights, including at least one to every single match.

“We are expecting a busy couple of weeks following the draw on Saturday, as is usually the case, and we have already received a large number of enquiries, from several countries. One million extra match tickets were also released at the weekend, so we anticipate particular interest from fan groups in the coming weeks. After this initial surge that we’re seeing, there will also be spikes in enquiries and bookings in March, when the three remaining nations will qualify through the play-offs, and then after the group stages, when teams know where their next match will be.”