Glossary · Bookings
FBO
Updated
An FBO, fixed-base operator, is the private terminal at an airport that handles charter and private jets, and a large airport can have three or four of them on different sides of the field. A booking that says "Teterboro" is not enough; the chauffeur needs the FBO name (Signature, Atlantic, Jet Aviation) and often the tail number.
FBO pickups are the top of the market and run on a different clock. There is no baggage claim and no walk; the chauffeur is cleared through the FBO's gate and waits beside the aircraft or at the FBO lounge door. Passengers step off and are in the car inside two minutes, which means the car has to be there before wheels down, not after.
The money is in getting it exactly right. These are the accounts that pay full rate and refer their friends, and one wrong-terminal pickup ends the relationship. The common mistake is booking an FBO run with the airport code only, or verifying the flight as if it were a scheduled airline departure when it is a private tail number the public systems may not track.
How liverybook handles it
The pickup address on the leg is the FBO itself, found through LocationIQ address autocomplete and deduplicated by place id, so the same FBO is one record rather than six spellings. Flight verification through AeroDataBox covers scheduled flights; a private tail number is a dispatcher's call to the FBO, and the pickup time is set from that. Meet and greet, wait time and parking apply as on any airport leg. See bookings.
Related terms
This term lives in Bookings. liverybook is the operating system for ground transportation.