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Airlines Dropping NFL Charters to Make Room for More Revenue

Major airlines are beginning to drop NFL team charters because it pays more to have a flight of regular passengers.

Domestic airlines are seeing a business boom, with record numbers for both employment levels and profitability. More revenue comes in from all those ancillary fees: baggage costs, rewards programs, upgrades, and more. But ticket prices help as well, and it pays more to fly a plane full of regular passengers than to fly a chartered plane full of an NFL team.

According to ESPN, eight teams so far were dropped by the airlines running their charter arrangements: United ended its agreement with the Bills and the Lions, and American ended its deal with the Jaguars, Ravens, Colts, Dolphins, Steelers, and Cardinals.

Now the teams are scrambling to find reliable transportation to games. Some are opting to go with smaller airlines that have fewer planes, but that leads to concerns about mechanical issues that would cause delays. Atlas and Omni Air International are two of those smaller companies that are now flying NFL teams; normally they focus on military charter flights. The Bills took a different approach, checking with the NBA if two of their planes were available for use – the NBA owns two Delta Air Lines planes. Delta also requested use of the planes for NFL teams, and the NBA agreed, at least as long as the planes are needed.

Generally, NFL teams don’t own their own planes the way NBA teams do, which means it’s up to the teams to figure out their own transportation. All the airlines dropping NFL charter flights have been clear that the decision is based on revenue and has nothing to do with recent protests.

[Photo: Shutterstock]

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PHL October 4, 2017

This is so poorly written...it's difficult to follow and has numerous grammatical errors. If some of the NFL teams are "scrambling" to find alternate transportation, perhaps they should renegotiate their charge agreements with the airlines. Business is good again, and airlines have the upper hand. Pay them more and they'll happily transport the team.

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Icecat October 3, 2017

This is old news...As I mentioned on the ESPN web site, this was announced before summer even began.