Despite the concerns about the environmental devastation they cause and various security and safety problems at airports, more and more people seem to be using low-cost airlines for their holidays. This is a brief guide on what to expect. It is aimed at the British market, but is applicable elsewhere.

Buying Your Ticket

In the age of the Internet, low cost fares are just a couple of clicks away. Airlines will offer continental travel for a matter of pence. How can this be possible? Read-on McDuff and all will be explained.

Once you have found a ticket for London to Lyon for £1.50, you click on the link and it takes you to the plane booking page. Once there you will indeed find that there is a flight leaving for Lyon that costs only £1.50. It leaves at 4am on a Wednesday morning, in the middle of the school term, but the fare exists.

You decide that you can in fact take the kids out of school, so go ahead and select that, the look for a return flight. The cheapest costs in the region of £75 and above. Yes, it apparently costs the airline 50 times as much to fly back. Could be because it is going uphill on the way back!

Now of course, you could say that, I’ll take one airline there and another one back and mix-and-match, possible getting cheap fares each way. But you won’t. You don’t think it is worth the hassle, you think it will cost more, or you think that once the airline has taken you to foreign climbs, they have a duty to bring you back. None of these are true, the airline is trying to wring as much cash out of you as possible, do the same to them.

Now you have booked you tickets, you are given the final bill. This may include airport tax, fuel subsidies, hold-baggage supplement, carry-on-baggage supplement, carry-on-follow-that-camel-baggage supplement, extra-baggage supplement, no-baggage supplement, midget supplement, booking fees, handling fees, VAT and any other extra thing they can think of.

The final bill can be easily 30 or 40 times the advertised price of a single ticket.

Getting to the Airport

Remember to check that your flight is running. You can be guaranteed that the web-site will be down and nobody will be answering the phones when you do this. Arrive well before the check in closes. Allow yourself time to panic half way there when you realise that your passports are still on the bedside table. No not carry on without your passport. If you do, a TV camera crew will turn up and film you, making you look like an idiot for all of the 10 people who still watch fly-on-the-wall documentaries.

Since your flight is booked for 4am, unless you have a nocturnal friend with a car, you are going to have to drive and park or get a taxi. Add £30 to you bill at least. The other alternative is to stay at an airport hotel. This of course will actually be further from the airport than you own house!

Budget Airlines and the airports they serve are teeming with fly-on-the-wall camera crews looking for potential victims. The best way to avoid them is to keep calm and turn up for your plane. If you turn up late or drunk, they will film you and make you look like a ranting fool. No matter how legitimate you believe your complaint is and how many managers you try and call, you will not get on the plane and will get more TV coverage on some obscure Freeview channel. The only exception to this is if you are pregnant and heading for a wedding with two kids in tow, in which case the company C.O. will appear out of nowhere and get you on the plane!

If the flight is switched from your original airport to an airport nearer to you, go to the original airport. Yes it is annoying, but you can be guaranteed that the airline will not have the staff to check you in at the departure airport!

Wot, No Plane?

If you arrived late, it is your fault accept it. They will charge you for another ticket, it will be in the region of £300 and the plane will not leave for another two days!

If the plane is not there and it is the airline’s fault, they will try and get you on another flight, sometime in the same interglacial period. Or they will refund you the fare. Trying to get a refund on hotel bookings and hire-cars is like trying to get alcohol-free blood out of a Rolling-Stone, it isn’t going to happen!

The Flight

Once you have been herded into the seat next to two screaming kids that somebody else had left there before escaping to the quite part of the plane. Somehow try and smuggle lunch and a drink on board, a low cost airline will charge you a lot for the privilege of some sandwiches delivered overnight from Slough and probably on their third channel crossing of the day already.

The plane hands in ‘Lyon’ and you find the next exciting adventure in Budget Travel. There is a simple rule in Budget travel. The distance from the centre of the advertised cities to the airports used is equal to the pounds saved by not travelling on a regular airline. This means that a plane bound of Lyon can turn up in St-Etienne, Dijon or even Switzerland. It also allowed one Scandinavian Airline to fly to London Prestwick¹.

Try and find transport into the city. This will take a few hours, so it is lucky you got an early flight, by the time you get to the hotel, it will be time for bed.

Coming Back

This is the point in the holiday where something normally goes wrong, leaving you stranded. The airline will ‘pay’ for hotel rooms for you. By this it means you have to find a hotel room and pay for it and they will refund you if you get back home. Occasionally they will organise a hotel for you and transport to it, if they do this, they will leave a few members of the party at the hotel, make sure it is not you.

Of course, finding out how any information is a challenge worthy of Hercules or Anneka. Most of the staff will have vanished, and the ones left will have been specially trained by the SAS not to give up any information to the enemy in the face of any manner of torture.

Back Home

Now you are safe and sound back at home, twice as stressed as you were before your break. Now you can start thinking about your next holiday. How about Eurostar, or a canalling holiday!