Why Family Offices Are Driving Private Aviation's Growth
From Convenience to Infrastructure
For most of the past two decades, a family office weighing a private aircraft treated it as a convenience - faster, more private, worth it for the right trip. That calculation has changed. A new survey of senior family office executives, commissioned by Airbus Corporate Jets, shows private aviation has moved from an occasional indulgence to a fixture of how internationally active family offices now operate, and the shift is accelerating faster than most outside the industry realize. This report walks through what the survey found, why it's happening, and what it means for any family office weighing how much to invest in private aviation over the next two years.
The Survey: How the Data Was Gathered
Airbus Corporate Jets commissioned independent research firm Pureprofile to survey 73 senior executives from family offices collectively managing $303 billion in assets, fielded in May 2025 and published in October 2026. The results point to one conclusion: business aviation has shifted from a discretionary benefit to what ACJ President Chadi Saade calls "a strategic necessity" for internationally active families.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Increased private jet use over the past two years | 96% |
| Expect usage to rise 50–100% over the next two years | 85% |
| Share of family office business travel already flown privately | 70% |
| Save 2–3 hours per trip versus flying commercial | 89% |
| Report at least 25% greater productivity on board | 92% |
| Say 25–50% of trips go to destinations with no direct commercial service | 67% |
Source: Business Aviation Key to Family Office Expansion – Airbus Corporate Jets, Oct 1, 2026
Why: The Multi-Jurisdiction Office Has Become the Norm
The growth in flying isn't about indulgence - it's about geography. Nearly 70% of the family offices surveyed opened an office in a new jurisdiction within the past five years, and that expansion is the clearest driver of the jump in private aviation use. Three reasons stand out:
Family members living abroad: 90% of executives cited a rising number of family members based across multiple countries as the key driver behind increased travel.
Diversified portfolios: 72% pointed to increasingly international investment portfolios that now require in-person oversight across more markets.
Geopolitical risk management: 28% cited the need to manage exposure across jurisdictions as a factor in how the office now moves people and decisions.
As family offices spread across borders, their travel patterns fragment away from the handful of major commercial hubs those routes were built around - which is exactly where private aviation closes the gap.
The Operational Case: Time, Access, and Who Gets to Fly
Beyond the headline numbers, the survey points to three practical shifts worth noting:
Demand is rising across every aircraft category. 43% of family offices expect large-jet use to grow 50–75%, 55% expect similarly strong growth in medium-sized jets, and 32% anticipate the same for light aircraft. This isn't a story about one segment pulling ahead - it's broad-based growth across the fleet.
Access is widening inside the office. 92% of family offices now allow more staff - not just principals - to use private aviation, and 97% expect that access to expand further over the next three years. Business aviation is becoming an operating tool for the whole organization, not a perk reserved for the family.
The top cited benefit isn't speed — it's confidentiality. Executives ranked the ability to work on sensitive matters in the air, away from commercial cabins and shared lounges, as the single biggest advantage of flying privately. That, paired with the fact that 67% of respondents say 25–50% of their trips serve destinations with no direct commercial service, reframes private aviation as a tool for doing business discreetly in places scheduled airlines simply don't reach.
The Bigger Picture: A Fast-Growing Client Base
The survey's findings sit on top of a broader trend: the family office itself is a growing category of client. Deloitte Private research cited by Forbes Australia counted roughly 8,030 single family offices worldwide as of its 2024 report, up from 6,130 in 2019, together managing about $3.1 trillion in assets. The same research projects that number will reach roughly 10,720 offices and $5.4 trillion in assets under management by 2030, with the wealth of the families they serve rising from $5.5 trillion to $9.5 trillion over the same period. Asia-Pacific has already overtaken Europe in the number of family offices (2,290 versus 2,020) and, per the same Deloitte Private research, is expected to grow faster than North America through 2030.
Put simply: there are more family offices than there were five years ago, each one is managing more assets, and - per the Airbus survey - each one is flying privately more often than it was two years ago. Those three trends compound.
Source: Family Offices to reach $8 trillion by 2030, Asia-Pacific leads growth – Forbes Australia, Sept 2024, citing Deloitte Private research.
What This Means in Practice
For a family office that is already flying privately, or considering it, the data points to a few practical questions worth raising now rather than later:
Is your travel strategy built for where the office is going, not where it started? If the office has added or plans to add a jurisdiction, routing and aircraft needs should be reassessed alongside that expansion, not after it.
Does your access policy match how the office actually works? With 92% of surveyed offices already extending private aviation access beyond the principal family, it's worth revisiting who on the team is authorized to fly privately, and under what approval process.
Are you positioned for rising demand on your preferred aircraft category? With growth expected across light, medium, and large jets alike, offices that wait to formalize a charter or membership arrangement may find their preferred aircraft type harder to secure on short notice, particularly during peak periods.
Is confidentiality built into how you fly, not just where? If sensitive discussions regularly happen in the air, that should shape choices around operator, aircraft configuration, and even which airports and FBOs are used.
The Colibrì Jets View
This survey tracks exactly with what we see day to day with our own family office clients at Colibrì Jets. The real value was never the aircraft itself - it's the hours returned on a trip, and the destinations a scheduled airline never served in the first place. As more offices operate across more borders, the question isn't whether private aviation belongs in the travel strategy; for most of our clients, that question is already settled. The question is whether the strategy is still matched to how far, how often, and how discreetly the office now needs to move.
If your office's footprint has grown over the past two years, it may be worth a conversation about whether your current travel arrangements have grown with it. We're glad to talk through what that looks like.
