FlyUSA CEO Barry Shevlin on Chartering the World Cup, How the Fastest Growing Private Aviation Company is Handling a 300% Demand Spike

When FIFA President Gianni Infantino needs to be in a different city for nearly every match of the World Cup, he doesn't join the security line at the commercial terminal. He charters. And this world cup is no exception to that.

In this tournament, plenty of people do the same. Across the private aviation industry, charter operators, including FlyUSA, are reporting demand spikes of roughly up to 300% tied directly to the World Cup, as fans, executives, and sponsors chase their teams across the country on their own schedules rather than the airlines'.

For an industry built on flexibility, the World Cup has become both a marketing moment and a stress test for private-aviation industry operators alike. Operators are managing a compressed, unpredictable travel calendar shaped by knockout-round uncertainty, tightened FAA traffic controls, and a client base increasingly willing to pay for control over their own itinerary. And this doesn’t even consider the influence adverse weather may have on these itineraries.

Few companies illustrate that better than FlyUSA – recently recognized as the fastest-growing private aviation company in the United States – which has spent the duration of the tournament balancing a historic surge in bookings against the everyday realities of fleet logistics, weather, and airport access.

Why Fans Would Rather Charter

The case for private aviation during a global tournament is, on its face, simple. The travelers filling these cabins are largely at an income level where cost isn't the deciding factor – control and flexibility are. Commercial schedules are fixed and unforgiving; private aviation offers the ability to build a trip around the match schedule rather than the other way around. That flexibility, more than luxury or status, is what operators say is driving the surge.

During an interview with AeroXplorer, Barry Shevlin, CEO at FlyUSA, put it simply: “You don't know who's going where until the match is finished,”. A fan following a team through the knockout rounds doesn't know where they'll need to be in ten days. A commercial itinerary can't accommodate that kind of uncertainty – especially on a short-notice time frame.

Built on Flexibility

Infantino's travel schedule is a useful case study in just how complicated that flexibility becomes. Early in the tournament, logistics are relatively straightforward: match times and locations are set well in advance, and operators can plan routes, FBO reservations, and slots accordingly. That changes the moment the group stage ends. Once the bracket narrows, no one knows which cities will host which teams until results are in, which means operators are effectively planning contingency routes for outcomes that haven't happened yet. 

As put by Barry: “Whatever flights we sell today, you know, 50% of them are gonna fly in the next 5 or 6 days, and then 50% are further out. So, I think the industry's built to deal with last-minute responses to demand.”

Reservations at fixed-base operators and airport slots – both finite resources during a tournament drawing this much traffic – have to be held, adjusted, or released on short notice as the picture becomes clearer game by game.

One of the more counterintuitive findings of the tournament has been the timing of demand itself. Operators, including FlyUSA, had expected bookings to ramp up early, assuming fans and sponsors would plan far in advance for an event of this scale. That's not what happened. Real demand didn't materialize until the middle of May, and the heaviest booking activity has come in the 30 days leading directly up to kickoff. In other words, the market that private aviation exists to serve – travelers who want to decide late and move fast – behaved exactly as expected, but was just later than operators had planned for. That compressed timeline has put pressure on scheduling, staffing, and aircraft positioning all at once, right as demand hit its peak.

That late, compressed surge causes operational tension. Every aircraft sitting idle and ready for a same-day charter request is an aircraft not generating revenue on a scheduled trip. However, it also creates leeway: idle capacity is precisely what allows operators to say yes to the last-minute bookings the World Cup is generating in volume. Managing and balancing these uncertainties, along with the repositioning costs of moving aircraft to where demand actually materializes rather than where it was predicted, has become one of the defining operational challenges of the tournament for fleet planners across the industry.

FlyUSA's Breakout Moment

For FlyUSA, the tournament has arrived at a pivotal moment in the company's growth. June is on pace to be the best month in the company's history, and bookings are running well ahead of last year. The company expects that pace to taper in July and August as the tournament moves into its final rounds and international visitors either head home or continue on to other travel.

That international dimension matters. While the majority of FlyUSA's customers are based in the U.S., the company has been supporting clients worldwide throughout the tournament, and it has seen a significant influx of international travelers who flew in specifically to follow their national teams. Some of those fans will go home after their team is eliminated; others will stay and keep moving through the bracket. That split makes the second half of the tournament harder to plan for than the first: operators won't know until results come in how much of that international travel base sticks around, and for how long.

Navigating Disruptions

To make matters more complex, the FAA has implemented strict flight plan filing windows and Traffic Management Initiatives during peak match periods, tightening the margins operators have to work with around high-traffic games. FlyUSA's approach has leaned on direct communication: rather than simply absorbing a delay or restriction, the company calls clients proactively to suggest schedule movements – shifting a departure earlier or later – so that a regulatory constraint doesn't turn into a missed kickoff.

Weather poses a similar challenge, and it's an area where operators say private aviation holds a real advantage over commercial carriers. With a private operation, there's more room to route around weather systems and adjust timing – moving a departure earlier if a system is building, for instance – rather than being locked into a single scheduled slot.

Barry elaborated on how FlyUSA navigates such events: “If there's a [weather] system that's coming in, and it looks like it's going to hit at 11 a.m. [...] if we could be wheels up by 9 or 9:30, we're probably not going to have any delays,” He explained. “ We would ask the passenger, ‘Would you mind leaving two hours early?' That kind of proactive call is the core of the approach: do everything possible to communicate and give the client options, so their flights aren't disrupted. The last thing any operator wants is clients sitting around the airport, because even though the FBOs are nice, that's not the experience they're looking for.” 

Where the Jets Are Going

Geography has shaped demand in a very specific way this tournament. The single busiest route has been Miami to Teterboro, with heavy traffic running up and down the East Coast. This is a direct reflection of which teams have been playing where: Germany, Brazil, and Spain have all had matches on the East Coast, and cities like Dallas and Kansas City have pulled in additional traffic as host sites. The West Coast, by contrast, has seen comparatively little private aviation activity tied to the tournament, since outside of the U.S. and Qatar, few of the marquee teams have played games out west.

Looking ahead, FlyUSA expects overall volume to hold steady through the summer before easing in the back half of July and into the later months, with a genuine lull expected in August that should give the operation room to reset. Capacity will be a little tighter through the remaining rounds, but the company is flexible: if the exact aircraft a client wants isn't available, they'll find a way to make the trip work rather than turn the request away.

The Real Test

That commitment gets at the heart of what this tournament has become for the private aviation industry: a live, high-stakes test of whether the sector's core promise can hold up under sustained, unpredictable demand. Pricing power during a surge like this is real, and last-minute inventory has commanded a premium as it's disappeared fast. But the operators who come out of the World Cup with their reputations intact will be the ones who managed that pricing without breaking client trust, and who handled a 300% demand spike with professionalism.

FlyUSA is the fastest-growing private aviation company in the U.S., and the World Cup has been its biggest logistical test yet. How it holds up will decide whether this summer's surge becomes a lasting foundation or just a peak.