Low-cost carriers
Fly across Europe for as little as $25—welcome to the wonderful age of no-frills airlines, the little jet engines that could
The days of high plane fares are over, my friends, as are the days of having to spend two days on a train just to cross a continent cheaply.
Thanks to no-frills airlines and low cost carriers like easyJet, Wow, Ryanair, and more you can often now hop a plane for considerably less than it costs than the train—and for bucketloads less than the former regular fare on most established airlines—while at the same time save dozens of hours on travel.
Cheaper, easier, faster—what more could you want? Well, how about making Europe more manageable? No-frills are also opening up the "corners" of Europe to travelers—Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, Greece—turning what were once epic journeys of two or three days on trains and ferries into easy two- or three-hour flights.
Heck, you can even use low-cost airlines to get from one place in the U.K. to another more quickly and cheaply than the train, bus, or ferry.
In practical terms: Let's take a hypothetical trip from London to Venice:
- By train, 15 hours, $246
- By traditional airline, 3 hours, $258
- By no-frills airline, 3 hours, $48
How can they do it?
Well, "no-frills" means they cut a few corners—but not ones you'd really miss.
What frills are missing?
A good aggregator will include these flights in the mix of fares they find.
However, since almost all inter-European travel is short haul—most flights within Europe are 60– to 90-minute hops—who's going to care about getting a snack instead of a meal, or paying for your drinks, or missing in-flight entertainment? You're on the plane for two to three hours max—barely time to get to cruising altitude, munch on whatever cheap snack you brought onboard, and read a chapter or two of your novel.
Seating on a no-friller is generally a first-come, first-served free-for-all familiar to anyone who has flown Southwest. You're guaranteed a seat, of course; that's not an issue. But if you're particular about getting aisle/window, or want to be sure you and your companions get to sit together, show up early enough.
Most no-frills also shave costs on the end of operations that you don't really see (flying just one model of jet, so that maintenance and parts costs are easily contained, that sort of thing).
They also tend to fly at less popular hours, since those "slots" at the airports are cheaper (or, more frequently, those are the only slots the airports—long in the pockets of the major airlines—will grant them).
One of the big savings on no-frills balance books comes from the fact that they fly largely out of secondary airports at or near major cities (in London, out of Luton or Stansted rather than Heathrow or Gatwick).
Is this a problem? Not to my mind. In fact, in some cases it can be a major benefit.
Major benefits to minor airports
OK, almost all major airports are well outside town to begin with, and even with the ones that have special high-speed rail links into town, you're looking at anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes to get out there. So what's an extra 10 to 20 minutes to go all the way out to some secondary airport the no-friller uses when you're saving literally hundreds of dollars on the fare?
This can also be a godsend to folks with a quirky itinerary in mind, allowing you to make an otherwise inconvenient flight from, say, London to Ancona in Italy.
What's more, smaller airports are often more convenient. With its long lines, crowds, and sheer size, I have never gotten out of Heathrow in less than an hour and a half. However, on a no-frills flight from Barcelona to London's Luton airport, the plane taxied right up to the arrivals gate, I walked down the staircase, across 50 feet of tarmac, and through the doors.
I glided past the smiling passport clerk and waited at the luggage belt immediately beyond for but a few minutes before my bag trundled its way out on the belt. I checked my watch as I exited the airport and crossed the sidewalk to the bus that would take me to downtown London. Time from stepping off the plane to boarding the bus: 12 minutes.
Beat THAT Heathrow!
Lost-cost carriers connect the dots
Perhaps the best thing about no-frills airlines is that all tickets are priced one-way, all the time. That means you can easily hopscotch your way across the Continent without ever having to return to some central or origin airport first.
You could fly transatlantic into London, and then use cheap no-frills tickets elsewhere in Europe on any of a variety of airlines (no need to be loyal to just one).
Perhaps you'll fly first down to Venice for the Italy portion of your vacation, then from there perhaps amble over to Athens, then mosey on up to Munich, bop over to Barcelona, and finally lug all your souvenirs back to London for your flight home.
Connecting the dots thusly (by flying first into London—always the cheapest European gateway) is called the Big Ben Swithcheroo, and the strategies, secrets, and pitfalls involved are described in detail elsewhere on this site. For now, let's look at a few drawbacks to the no-frills phenomenon.
Pack light—real light
Ryanair in particular is notorious for this—especially for slapping outrageous fees on luggage or carry-ons that are as little as an ounce overweight.
You know how you sometimes hear a news story about some airline that is threatening to start charging to use the toilets, or is considering selling standing-room-only berths? Yep: that's Ryanair.
Beyond the onerous and sometimes indefensible fees, many Ryanair employees are simply flat-out rude to customers. Some are almost gleefully cruel to you.
Unless it is the only option on your chosen route, I recommend avoiding Ryanair precisely because it has such atrocious customer service.
However, most no-frills airlines are far, far better than that. Don't let horror stories you hear about Ryanair put you off from flying its far friendlier rivals.
Most no-frills have strict (on some, draconian—side the box to the right) baggage weight limits and charge exorbitantly steep fees if you go over. Travel writers accumulate an obscene amount of research in the form of brochures and other heavy paper items, and I've ended up paying more at the check-in counter for my excess baggage than for my plane ticket!
Then again, as I said above, most airlines in the U.S. now charge you a fee merely to check a bag at all, and while some no-frillers have jumped on this bandwagon, others are still letting that first bag sail through for free so long as it's not over 25 kilos (roughly 50 pounds)—so it's actually a frill they're offering that the major airlines at home are not! » more
But are no-frills airlines trustworthy?
Good question. If you've never heard of some of these carriers, would you fly with them?
Well, I don't have all the answers, but I can tell you this: I've never had a problem flying a low-coast airline (aside from rude Ryanair clerks). In fact, when I took my Boy Scout troop to Europe one summer, we ended up flying everyone from London to Amsterdam on easyJet because taking the Chunnel train and switching in Brussels would have taken longer and cost more.
I've flown from London to Prague, from Venice to Santorini, Paris to Bologna, Alghero (in Sardegna) to Pisa, and many other routes on no-frillers in Europe and scarcely had any problems aside from those overages on luggage (and, once, a four-hour delay—but that airline's out of business now, and I've had worse delays on American Airlines, Northwest, US Airways, Delta... well, actually, all of them).
I do trust that the majority of alternative airlines are legitimate business, every bit as capable as a major airline is of getting you from point A to point B safely, and often far more inexpensively.
A lot of folks worry that a smaller airlines has a higher chance of going belly-up between the time you buy tickets and the day of the flight. That is a bit illogical. Frankly I'm more concerned about the future of all those major US carriers that have spent the past decade wallowing in, or flirting with, Chapter 11.
Any airline, no matter how large or important, can merge or go out of business overnight. Just ask anyone who once flew or worked for such massive, standard-bearer, household-name airlines as United, US Airways, TWA, Eastern, or PanAm. (My first flight to Europe was on Eastern, and I used to live near a TWA hub.)
I figure these scrappy little guys have just as much of a chance of staying in business as any airline these days. Keep in mind that only a few of these alternative airlines in Europe are actually recent start-ups. Most have been operating for years if not decades. It's just that they've been (heh) flying under the radar of public awareness.
In many cases, they've heretofore been serving as charter airlines whose names were known only to the travel agents and tour companies that booked them, or as regional carriers operating under a contract with (and under the name of) a more famous airline.
- Momondo.com - (Aggregator) Before I get into details, just know this: 95% of the time, I find the lowest fares on Momondo. Momondo quietly blows most of the other aggregators out of the water. It searches more than 600 airline sites, plus booking engines, search engines, travel agencies, online discounters, etc. This is two to three times as many sources as the competition—including the low-cost carriers and no-frills airlines most of the other search engines ignore—and it pays off. You can also quickly see which flight is cheapest and which quickest (and which best overall), as well as use all the usual filters on the results (length of flight, departure/arrival times, number of stops, airlines, etc.). I ran Momondo through many tests, and it almost always found the lowest available fares on domestic, Transatlantic, and inter-European flights. It found fares from carriers none of the others did, and when it did find the same flights as some of the competition, it almost invariably managed to find a lower price for it. For now, at least, I'm calling it: Momondo is the single best resource out there, bar none.Partner
- Flyinternational.com - (Consolidator) The airfares branch of AutoEurope.com consistently offers among the cheapest (and most reliable) European airfare consolidators out there. Barring some sale fare elsewhere, this is where I almost always end up buying my transatlantic tickets for the simple reason that they are almost always the cheapest. This is also why I chose to partner with them for this site.Partner
- Skyscanner.com - (Aggregator) Another excellent aggregator that, like Momondo, also includes the little low-cost carriers and no-frills airlines ignored by most other search engines. I like that you can be as vague on your departure/arrivial points as simply an entire country, rather than a specific city of airport—you never know when, say, a flght into Manchester will actually be cheaper than one to London.Partner
- Hotwire.com - (OTA) Offers regaular fare searches and Hot Rates opaque fares (cost less, but with slightly less control over departure times and other details)Partner
- VirginAtlantic.com - Given all options, I will actually pay a bit more for Virgin Atlantic flight than one on any other airline. They just treat you so much better.Partner
- Google.com/flights - (Aggregator) Google has acquired ITA, the original airfare booking engine long used by travel agents. It's now available to the general public, and niftily shows you the rough current lowest cost for flights to pretty much anywhere from your hometown via a Google map measled with red dots marking major cities around the world. It doesn't allow you to book, but will tell you where/how to book the results it finds. Not really a strong performer on internaitonal flights yet—though, oddly, does a good job with last-minute international fares, so worth checking.
- Expedia.com - (OTA) Expedia—which does a fine job on middle-of-the-road fares—is the last remaining of the Big Three online travel agencies. (Expedia bought both Travelocity and Orbitz in 2015; Travelocity's search results are now identical to those at Expsia, and we can only hope Orbitz's lackluster results follow suit.)Partner
- Hipmunk.com - (Aggregator) The aggregator that rethought how searches should be delivered—and I always like those who think outside the search box. All results are shown on a timeline, and the default sort-order for flights that match your search is "Agony"—a combination factoring in price, flight duration, and stopovers—so that the least annoying options pop up first. You can also sort more traditionally by price, duration, departure time, arrival time, non-stop only, and ask it to favor your preferred airlines (or airline alliance). One drawback: It really only serarches the airlines directly plus a few booking engines like Expedia, so you're not getting the full story (no discounters are in the mix). Still: handy.
- CheapOair.com - (OTA) Upstart consolidator and discounter using the power of the Web to weave together the best bargains and negotiated discounts with three reservations systems and fifteen travel service providers—something of a mash-up of a traditional booking service and a wholesaler. It claims 18 million exclusive flight deals, a low airfare guarantee, and 84,000 negotiated hotel rates.Partner
- Vayama.com - (Aggregator) One of the original international airfare aggregators, and still one of the better ones.Partner