For professional GA (i.e. jets, air taxi, etc) much of the flight planning burden is relieved by the Flight Operations Department of the company concerned. They take of the flight plan, PPR, parking, immigration, customs, GAR forms, etc. All the pilots have to do is show up and fly. 
As I become increasingly time-poor, the time involved in arranging the various ancillary elements of a flight becomes an obstacle. It would be nice to have someone else take some of the load – in essence, to act as a Flight Ops department. I suppose I could recruit Mrs F. 
I am quite happy to plan my own route (and in fact, I would prefer to do so) but was wondering if a service exists whereby I nominate the destination and arrival time and someone else takes care of the various permissions, authorisations and obligations such as PPR, immigration, customs and so on? Does anything like this exist?
If you want me to type your data into the euroga flight planner and mail you the results, rates are open to discussion.
Various firms offer flight support services, mostly aimed at bizjets.
Jeppesen is one. I have never used them for this but used to know someone who worked in that department. They started at a few hundred $ a month and offered various levels.
At the bottom end are firms like a bizjet pilot friend of mine uses, which charges 35 euros for a routepack. I imagine the automatic routing toold have eaten a lot of their lunch…
IMHO the flight support business model is under pressure because Eurocontrol lost control of autorouting in 2008 (they tried to block access to it for years, for reasons one can only speculate on) and with booking.com etc for booking hotels, there is not much meat left.
The other thing is that most bizjet pilots, and wealthy private pilots, like to use handlers, and they usually arrange PPR etc if you just send them an email with the details.
There is a move within France, and maybe other places, to require a form submission via a central website / portal. See a previous thread on Annecy. Bizjet pilots hate this because it wastes a lot of their time. There was a minimum weight last time I looked, fortunately.
Finners,
all the usual flight support services (which mostly do permits, PPRs, visas for weird countries and such) will gladly do these things for you. They don’t differentiate between “light GA” and “big stuff GA”.
It is not their core business to do these things for flights within Central Europe because
a) there is usually rather little paperwork involved
b) private pilots want to save the money
c) private pilots do enjoy doing this to a certain degree
but they will do it for you if you give them your credit card authorisation.
Me personally, I would neve give these things away for flights in Europe. For the above reasons, but mostly because I don’t want an “interface” between my intentions and my paperwork. Also, for me personally, nobody can do these things better than me.
It’s really no big deal:
-a flightplan every now snd than
-a landing/parking PPR every now and then (which often serves as briefing as well, so no use giving this out of hand)
-rarely: some customs/immigration arrangements.
That’s it.
I know that RocketRoute has launched a new service called “Flight concierge” which seemed to match what you are seeking : http://www.rocketroute.com/markets/trip-support
Thanks everyone.
@Jan_Olieslagers – good try! That was the one bit I wanted to do myself though.
@Peter – I can certainly see how route planning must have been a black art in the past. It’s certainly fairly easy today with all the tools available – including the excellent Autorouter. You’re right about handlers – they can be quite expensive and provide more service than I really need and at the same time, less service – it’s not one single point of contact.
@boscomantico – I was hoping for a flight support service like the “big stuff GA” but without the “big stuff GA” price. Obviously, I don’t expect or need exactly the same service. Being based in the UK, every trip requires some sort of customs/immigration. I appreciate that none of this is terribly difficult, but it can be time consuming. For first trips to any location, it’s a matter of finding who to contact for the various elements. I figured that many people might be in my situation and therefore someone would already have solved this problem.
@LimaVictor – that looks like exactly what I was seeking. Thank you very much! I will give the Flight Concierge a try.
I’ve just had a mailing from RR about this.
[my bold]
Where is the market, at this price level? One needs to ask what people are paying for given that the routing tool is free.
Peter wrote:
One needs to ask what people are paying for given that the routing tool
I actually find checking operational hours / immigration availability / existence of night possibility or not / car rental an issue that takes a long time to plan (possibly a couple of hours).
This includes looking at the map, check all the airports around the destination, and possible options to actually get to the destination, hotels / airbnb in each or at destination. It can get very detailed.
If they got to the level I sometimes have to do, I can see how it could be worth a few tens of euros for certain flights (saving a ton of phonecalls to verify info in AIP etc).
However, I would’t pay for it because:
1) I enjoy doing the planning part
2) I don’t fly enough for it to be worth the price they are proposing / most of my flights don’t require it: I just file on Autorouter, which is also much faster than using the poorly designed rocket route app. 80% of the flights probably take low single digit minutes to plan.
