Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Eduard Savushkin · SkyUp · August 2026
To go with Monday's note, detail rather than a description of us. Your own site names four lines: scheduled, charter, wet lease and cargo. Three of those are sold to other businesses. This is the European buyer set behind them: who signs inside each group, and roughly how many of them there are.
Airlines that lease capacity in
The smallest group on this page by count and the largest by order size. Demand here is created by events rather than by budgets: an aircraft out of service, a delivery that slipped, a season that outgrew the fleet. The decision sits with a planning team that already knows a handful of operators by name, which is why an operator outside that handful rarely gets the call.
Who signs: chief commercial officer, head of network or fleet planning, head of wet lease, director of operations.
Several hundred across Europe
European carriers holding an operating certificate; the group that leases capacity in any given season is smaller still and changes every year
Tour operators and travel wholesalers
The largest countable group and the one that commits seats furthest ahead. Buying is seasonal and contracted, so the conversation that decides next summer happens during this winter, long before the flying it covers.
Who signs: product or aviation director, charter manager, managing director, head of purchasing.
60,000 to 80,000
travel agency and tour operator businesses registered across Europe; most are single office retailers, and the layer that contracts aircraft is a few thousand inside that
Freight forwarders and cargo agents
A cargo line sells to the forwarder, not to the shipper. The forwarder decides which operator moves the freight, and it decides weekly rather than annually, which makes this the fastest cycle on the page and the one that rewards simply being reachable.
Who signs: head of airfreight, charter desk manager, procurement lead, station or gateway manager.
Thousands across Europe
forwarding and cargo agency businesses file under broad logistics classifications that also capture road haulage, so no clean count of the airfreight layer is published
Charter buyers outside the travel trade
Sports clubs and leagues, entertainment tours, energy and mining rotations, cruise lines moving crew, government and relief work. Each buys aircraft time without ever thinking of itself as an aviation buyer, and each is reached by name rather than by list.
Who signs: team or tour operations manager, logistics director, crew travel manager, procurement lead, event producer.
No public register
identified one organization at a time, which is the reason the segment stays open
Corporate travel and meetings buyers
Large employers move groups for conferences, incentives and shift rotations. The seat that owns it is a travel or procurement manager rather than anyone in aviation, and it is a seat that almost never hears directly from an operator.
Who signs: head of corporate travel, procurement category manager, mobility manager, events lead.
Counted by employer, not by aviation
reached through employer registers by size and sector rather than through any travel register, so the list is built rather than bought
Capacity and charter brokers
The layer between demand and aircraft. Brokers do not create demand, they route it, and they route it to the operators they can price quickly. Being on that shortlist is a relationship. Being off it is invisible from the inside.
Who signs: broker or account director, head of charter, operations manager.
A small named group
specialist charter and capacity brokers are not enumerated in any public register; in practice the market knows them by name

Where the openings are

1
Capacity is bought at a moment, not on a cycle. A grounded aircraft, a delivery that slipped, a route award, a competitor that stopped flying. Those events are public days or weeks before a lease request exists. Watching several hundred carriers for them every week is mechanical work rather than relationship work, and it is the part a contact book cannot do.
2
Four lines, four different buyers. Scheduled seats are sold to travelers, charter is sold to organizers, wet lease is sold to airline planners, cargo is sold to forwarders. One channel almost always serves whichever buyer it was built for and quietly starves the other three.
3
The travel trade is the largest countable group and the least worked by name. Tens of thousands of agencies and operators across Europe contract capacity, and only a few thousand of them ever contract an aircraft. A relationship channel reaches the ones already known. The rest are not unqualified, they are unaware.
4
Next summer is contracted this winter. Aviation demand is planned against a season rather than a quarter, so the useful conversation happens months before the capacity is needed. A channel that runs every week catches that window. One that starts when the schedule looks thin arrives after it closed.
Built from public registries and published European business counts, current to the most recent published year. Counts are banded deliberately. The travel trade figure covers registered agency and tour operator businesses across Europe rather than the smaller layer that contracts aircraft. Charter buyers, brokers and forwarding businesses are not separately enumerated in any public register and are described rather than counted. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
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