Should a charter broker buy quoting software or hire another broker?
It depends on where the time goes. Quoting software fits when sourcing aircraft and turning a request into a quote is the slow part. Another broker fits when there are more clients than your brokers can serve. An outsourced back office takes sourcing, quoting and billing off the broker's desk. Having the workflow built, by an independent builder, such as Alea Applied AI, fits when requests stall between the inbox, the quoting tool and the passenger files.
Updated
How do the four options compare?
Prices are the ones each company published on 25 October 2026. Wages are medians from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS). Each cell is a summary: the detail and the qualifiers are below.
| Compared on | Buy quoting software | Hire another broker | Use an outsourced back office | Have it built |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Avinode Advanced, its first plan with TripManager: 1,058 dollars a month for one user, on a prepaid contract of six or twelve months. Aviapages Personal: 29 euros a month for one account. FL3XX's page for brokers prints no price. | No official wage for the title. Our stand-in, travel agents: a BLS median of 50,160 dollars a year in May 2025, and an ONS median in the UK of 29,362 pounds a year in April 2026. Employer costs come on top. | Jet Access's Broker Alliance page prints no fee. It gives broker commission splits starting at 70 percent to the broker. | A review of about a week, then a build quoted at a fixed price before it starts. |
| Time to live | The pricing pages of Avinode and Aviapages, and FL3XX's page for brokers, give no setup time. Aviapages offers its Personal plan free for fourteen days. | The time it takes to recruit and train one person. | Jet Access's page gives no start time. | A review of about a week, then a first working version usually live in two to four weeks. |
| Covers | Avinode: sourcing across operators, and in TripManager quotes, contracts and payments. Aviapages: one request sent to several operators, the offers compared. FL3XX Source: customers, sourcing, pricing, quotes and invoices. | Whatever one more person can source, price, sell and follow up in working hours. | Sourcing, quoting and flight support around the clock, trip oversight, and billing, accounting and client analytics, with a CRM. | Request intake and quote preparation, passenger manifests and documents, client preferences on every trip, and changes and rebooking, inside the systems you already run. |
| Leaves with you | Setting it up, keeping it current, and the requests, passenger documents and changes that arrive by email and phone rather than inside it. | Recruitment, training, supervision, cover for absence, and the hours the person does not work. | The selling. Its page says brokers stay in control of their brand and business, and lists an independent contractor agreement. | Agreeing the acceptance criteria, and the cases the rules pass to a named person. |
What does each option cost, and what does it cover?
Each option is described from its own published pages, read on 25 October 2026, in the currency the page prints, and closes on when it fits.
Buy quoting software
Quoting software finds the aircraft and turns the request into a quote. Avinode's pricing page lists three plans for brokers, each including one user and priced by the month on a prepaid contract of six or twelve months: Starter at 740 dollars a month, Advanced at 1,058 and Ultimate at 2,119, or the same figures in euros, with each additional user at 128 dollars, or 118 euros a month; it notes that pricing and currency may differ with the business's location. Avinode says Starter is its most basic package, for the individual broker, with at most three licences, and that Advanced lets you quote, source and book trips in one place. TripManager, which Avinode describes as keeping quotes, contracts and payments in one place, comes with Advanced and Ultimate and not with Starter. Aviapages describes itself as an air charter marketplace: one quote request goes to several operators at once, and the offers are compared in one dashboard. Its plans for brokers are Personal at 29 euros a month or 299 a year and Entrepreneur at 59 or 599, each for one account, and Team, for five accounts, at 179 or 1,799, and a fourth, Custom, is arranged with its sales team. It offers Personal free for fourteen days. FL3XX describes FL3XX Source as a broker platform that automates pricing, charter quotes and invoices, with a two-way Avinode integration and an integrated CRM; its page for brokers prints no price and offers a discovery call. The pricing pages of Avinode and Aviapages, and FL3XX's page for brokers, give no setup time. This route fits when sourcing the aircraft and building the quote is where the time goes.
Hire another broker
Charter broker is not a title either statistics office reports. It is absent from the index of BLS's Occupational Outlook Handbook, which files a travel consultant and a corporate travel expert under travel agents, and from the ONS occupation figures, so we take travel agents as the nearest occupation on both sides: the choice of stand-in is ours. BLS describes travel agents as selling transportation, lodging and entertainment activities to people planning trips, and puts their median annual wage at 50,160 dollars in May 2025. It says earnings for many travel agents depend on commissions and service fees, and that its wage figures include money earned from commissions but not pay for self-employed workers. Benefits come on top: BLS's employer cost figures for June 2026 put them at 8.86 dollars an hour worked for private industry workers in sales and related occupations, against 26.99 in wages and salaries. In the UK, ONS's provisional figures for April 2026, in Employee earnings in the UK: 2026, put median gross annual earnings for travel agents in full-time employee jobs, held for a year or more, at 29,362 pounds. Employer costs come on top: GOV.UK gives employer National Insurance for 2026 to 2027 as 15 percent on earnings above 5,000 pounds a year for category letter A, and says the Employment Allowance lets eligible employers reduce their annual National Insurance liability by up to 10,500 pounds; it gives the minimum employer contribution under automatic enrolment as 3 percent, in most schemes on earnings between 6,240 and 50,270 pounds a year. This route fits when there are more clients than your brokers can serve, and the work that waits is the conversation and the sale.
Use an outsourced back office
An outsourced back office takes sourcing, quoting and the paperwork off the broker's desk, and leaves the selling with the broker. Jet Access, which describes its own charter fleet, FBO and maintenance network and in-house dispatch, calls its Broker Alliance a platform for independent charter brokers, and says they stay in control of their brand and business. Its page lists sourcing, quoting and flight support around the clock; trip oversight, from flight following to catering, ground arrangements and weather monitoring; billing, accounting and client analytics; operator vetting by its in-house safety team; and a CRM with sourcing technology and lead generation. It prints no fee. It gives broker commission splits starting at 70 percent to the broker, with up to 90 percent possible, and lists an independent contractor agreement among its documents. It gives no start time. This route fits when you would rather keep selling and hand the operational work to someone else, in return for a share of the commission.
Have it built
An independent builder builds the workflow inside the software your brokerage already runs, such as Avinode, and operates it afterwards. That is our work. For charter brokers we run request intake and quote preparation, passenger manifests and documents, client preferences on every trip, and changes and rebooking. Every action sits behind one of three gates: confirmations, reminders and filing run on their own; replies, quotes and documents are drafted and wait for a person to approve them; payments, anything sensitive and anything leaving the firm are a person's decision. Every access is logged, and sensitive data is kept apart. It starts with a review, about a week, that measures minutes from request to priced options first; the build is then quoted at a fixed price, against acceptance criteria written before it starts. This route fits when requests stall between the inbox, the quoting tool and the passenger files, or when nobody in the brokerage owns them.
What do we do, and on what terms?
We build and run the system inside the software your brokerage already uses. It starts with a review, about a week, that finds where requests and documents stall and what each fix is worth. The build is then scoped and quoted at a fixed price, and a first working version is usually live in two to four weeks: one client journey, live in your systems, against a written baseline. The acceptance criteria are written before any build begins: what the system will do, measured how, by when. If it misses, the fix is ours. After that we run and extend it, monthly, and you can cancel at any time.
How do you decide?
- Find where the time goes before you buy anything. Sourcing and quote building that take too long are a software question. Requests that wait because every broker is busy are a hiring question. Requests, documents and changes that stall between the inbox and the tools are a workflow question.
- Check what you already pay for. On Avinode's pricing page, TripManager comes with the Advanced and Ultimate plans and not with Starter.
- Measure minutes from request to priced options on your own requests before you decide: the charter goes to whoever quotes first.
- Cost the person in full: the wage, the employer's costs on top, and the time to recruit and train.
- Decide who owns it. Software needs someone to keep it current, a broker needs someone to manage them, an outsourced back office works to its own agreement, and a built system needs acceptance criteria that somebody in the brokerage agreed.
- The options combine. A built workflow sits on top of the quoting software, and a broker you hire works inside both.
When are we the wrong choice?
- If sourcing and building the quote are the whole delay, quoting software is the direct answer
- If the brokerage needs more selling and more client relationships, hire the broker
- If you want the sourcing, quoting and billing done for you while you keep selling, that is what an outsourced back office offers
- If you receive only a handful of requests a week, a tidy manual process is fine, and we will say so
- If you are about to change your quoting or sourcing software, wait until that settles rather than building twice
Frequently asked questions
Should a charter broker buy quoting software or hire another broker?
It depends on where the time goes. Quoting software speeds up sourcing and building the quote, priced by the month: Avinode lists Advanced, its first plan with TripManager, at 1,058 dollars a month for one user, on a prepaid contract of six or twelve months. Another broker adds hours for selling and for clients, paid by the year: BLS puts the median annual wage for travel agents, the stand-in we use, at 50,160 dollars in May 2025. Having the workflow built fits when requests stall between the inbox, the quoting tool and the passenger files.
What does charter quoting software cost?
On 25 October 2026 Avinode's pricing page listed its broker plans at 740, 1,058 and 2,119 dollars a month, or the same figures in euros, each for one user on a prepaid contract of six or twelve months, with TripManager from the 1,058 dollar plan. Aviapages listed plans for brokers at 29 and 59 euros a month for one account and 179 for five, or 299, 599 and 1,799 a year. FL3XX's page for brokers printed no price.
How much does it cost to hire another broker?
There is no official wage for a charter broker, so the stand-in is our choice: travel agents, where BLS's index files a travel consultant. BLS puts their median annual wage at 50,160 dollars in May 2025, commissions included, and says earnings for many depend on commissions and service fees; for private industry workers in sales and related occupations it put benefits at 8.86 dollars an hour worked in June 2026, against 26.99 in wages and salaries. In the UK, ONS's provisional median for travel agents in full-time employee jobs was 29,362 pounds a year in April 2026, before employer National Insurance and pension.
Can a charter broker outsource quoting and the back office?
Yes. Jet Access describes its Broker Alliance as a platform for independent charter brokers, with sourcing, quoting and flight support around the clock, trip oversight, and billing, accounting and client analytics. Its page prints no fee and gives broker commission splits starting at 70 percent to the broker. It lists an independent contractor agreement among its documents.
Does having it built mean replacing Avinode?
No. We build on top of the software your brokerage already runs, Avinode included: requests are read in, priced options are drafted for a broker to check and send, and passenger documents and preferences are kept beside each trip. Nothing is replaced, and no quote leaves the brokerage without a person's approval.
Can a brokerage use more than one of these?
Yes. They cover different parts of the work: quoting software the sourcing and the quote, a broker the client and the sale, an outsourced back office the operational support, and a built workflow the handoffs between them. A built system sits on top of the quoting software rather than replacing it.
Sources
Every statement on this page about a named company, a price, a wage or a rule was read at its source on 25 October 2026. Prices, wages and policies change: read them again before you rely on them.
- Avinode: pricing
- Avinode: the Marketplace for brokers
- Avinode: TripManager
- Aviapages: the business aviation marketplace
- Aviapages: pricing
- Aviapages: quote request
- FL3XX: FL3XX Source, for brokers
- Jet Access: Broker Alliance
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Occupational Outlook Handbook, A to Z index
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics: travel agents, Occupational Outlook Handbook
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026, Table 4, private industry by occupational group
- Office for National Statistics: Employee earnings in the UK: 2026
- Office for National Statistics: the data behind Figure 5 of that bulletin, annual full-time earnings by occupation
- GOV.UK: rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027
- GOV.UK: workplace pensions, what you, your employer and the government pay
See where the time is going
Book a private review. On a short call we map where work is getting stuck in your firm and whether there is a system worth building. No pitch, and if there is nothing there worth doing, we will say so.