Why Budget Airline Flights Aren’t Always The Bargain They Seem

Editor’s Note: This editorial draws on more than 25 years of independent travel, first-hand experience and publicly documented evidence and regulatory changes. Many of these editorials were written years before the issues became mainstream, and have been updated to reflect current developments while remaining true to their original arguments.

The budget airline model has, on the whole, been great for travel. It has opened up the world to millions of backpackers, gap year travellers and ordinary people who may never previously have been able to afford to fly. I genuinely love the concept of budget airlines and believe that, when they are done well, they have had a profoundly positive impact on travel. But that does not mean it has always been an entirely good thing, and increasingly budget airlines have led to the wholesale degradation of the flying experience, and increasingly they aren’t as good value as they first appear.

There has always been a darker side to those low, low prices, and those eye-catching flights across Europe for little more than the cost of lunch are not always the bargains they appear to be. So should travellers still fly with budget airlines, or is the supposedly more expensive option sometimes better value?

With the exception of the much-maligned Ryanair, which I have never been able to stand for a wide variety of reasons, I have generally loved budget airlines. They have allowed me to explore parts of the world that major carriers do not reach and have often helped me do so at a genuinely reasonable, sometimes remarkably cheap, price.

Or at least, I used to love them.

When I first wrote this article back in 2018, it was intended as a warning. Budget airlines were increasingly stripping fares back to the bare minimum, advertising irresistible headline prices and making more of their money through baggage charges, seat selection, priority boarding and an ever-growing menu of optional extras, which quite often included common courtesy and basic passenger rights.

Fast forward to today and that warning feels less like a prediction and more like standard airline practice. Unbundled fares and additional charges are now a normal part of flying. Every chance an airline has to slap an extra charge on something or take away what was once just an expected part of your ticket, and they have done so.

And of course where budget airlines lead, full-service carriers have followed, and have enthusiastically joined the same race to the bottom, removing services that were once included and selling them back to passengers one by one.

The basic lesson, however, has not changed: the cheapest flight on the booking screen is not always the cheapest journey.

Some low-cost airlines still manage to balance genuinely affordable fares with a perfectly reasonable service. Nobody expects luxury at budget prices, and most travellers understand that they will get what they pay for. A stripped-back flight can be an excellent compromise when the route is convenient, the fare includes everything you need and the airline gets you where you are going without treating you as an inconvenient piece of self-loading cargo.

But it is increasingly difficult not to feel hard done by as a passenger. It often feels as though you are paying more for far less, while services that were once accepted as basic parts of the journey are steadily removed, restricted or sold back to you as privileges.

The no-frills model has increasingly become less of a sensible compromise between low fares, convenience and comfort, and more of a wholesale freefall through the depths of hell. The advertised fare is often only the entrance fee. Add a conventional cabin bag, checked luggage, seat selection, priority boarding, airport check-in, a change to your booking or the cost of travelling from a secondary airport fifty miles from the city named on the ticket, and that bargain can disappear remarkably quickly.

Budget airlines can still offer excellent value. But only when you understand exactly what you are buying, what you are not buying and what the entire journey will really cost.

Let’s Be Fair, Those Low Fares Can Still Be Worth It.

The chance to hop around the world for less than the cost of a few train journeys is a genuinely great thing. Budget airlines opened up air travel on a scale that had never existed before, allowing ordinary travellers to take trips that might otherwise have remained completely unaffordable. Whatever else can be said about the model, it democratised flying, and that deserves recognition.

And more than that, they can still be worth it, if you know how to use the system.

Used properly, budget airlines can still be one of the best tools an independent traveller has. If you are travelling carry-on only for example, understand the baggage limits and know how to avoid understand the baggage limits and know how to avoid Ryanair’s commission-incentivised bag-size vampires at the gate, do not care where you sit and are taking a short direct flight between convenient airports, a genuinely cheap fare can be exceptional value.

This is especially true when travelling around regions such as Southeast Asia, where a one or two-hour flight can save an entire day or more of overland travel. If you are moving between major hubs like Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Singapore for example with one sensibly packed bag, a low-cost flight can be faster, easier and sometimes barely more expensive if not cheaper than the alternatives.

The same applies to short hops around Europe. When the airport is convenient, the schedule works and the fare remains low without any extras, there is absolutely no reason to pay more simply for the sake of flying with a traditional carrier.

I have travelled carry-on only for years, and I do not need silver service, endless entertainment or a glass of champagne before take-off. For a short flight, I am perfectly happy with a basic seat, a good book, and a safe, reasonably punctual journey. I do not need luxury; I simply need the stripped-back fare to remain genuinely stripped-back rather than becoming a trap designed to catch me out.

That is the key to making budget airlines work. Know the rules before you book, make sure your bag genuinely fits the allowance, check where the airport actually is, refuse the extras you do not need and compare the total journey rather than the advertised fare alone.

When all of that works in your favour, budget airlines are not merely acceptable. They can still be an absolute bargain.

How Can Budget Airlines Afford To Sell Flights So Cheaply?

Well, they can’t. It’s that simple. They cannot sell every seat at the lowest advertised price and still operate profitably.

An airline has to pay for or lease its aircraft, maintain them, fuel them, insure them and staff them. It must pay pilots and cabin crew, airport and ground-handling charges, air-navigation costs, applicable passenger taxes and all the other expenses involved in moving hundreds of people through the sky safely. None of that comes cheaply.

The lowest promotional fares work because only a proportion of seats are normally sold at that price. Other passengers pay higher fares, while the airline reduces its operating costs and earns additional revenue from the services passengers add during and after booking.

That is where the unbundled fare comes in. Instead of selling a flight that includes a normal package of services, the airline strips the journey back to its barest possible component: essentially, the right to occupy a seat between one airport and another. Almost everything else can then be priced and sold separately.

For many years, that was the defining feature of the traditional low-cost carrier. Direct sales reduced distribution costs, standardised fleets made maintenance and training simpler, fast turnarounds kept aircraft in the air for longer and dense seating put more passengers on each flight. Food, drinks, checked luggage and other services became optional rather than automatically included and, from a purely commercial perspective, it was an extraordinarily successful model.

And at first, much of it made sense. A passenger travelling with nothing more than a small bag should not necessarily have to subsidise someone checking two enormous suitcases, and someone who does not want an onboard meal should not have to pay for one. I have travelled carry-on only for most of my life and have often joked that I should receive a discount for making the airline’s job easier.

A genuinely stripped-back fare can be fair. The problem is what happened after airlines realised just how far the definition of an optional extra could be stretched.

The ‘Extras’ That Change The Real Cost Of Your Flight

Ancillary charges are no longer a small addition to the cost of flying. They have become a central part of the airline business model, and the stripped-back fare once associated almost exclusively with low-cost carriers has now spread across much of the wider industry.

Traditional full-service airlines watched budget carriers remove services from the basic ticket, charge passengers to add them back and make considerable additional revenue in the process. Unsurprisingly, many of them followed. Basic economy fares, hand-baggage-only tickets, paid seat selection, restricted flexibility and increasingly complicated fare tiers are now common across carriers that once differentiated themselves by including more in the price.

That is what makes the language of optional extras increasingly misleading.

An onboard meal is an extra. Lounge access is an extra. Champagne, additional entertainment or a seat that turns into a bed are extras. But a reasonable cabin bag, the ability to sit with the person you booked alongside, a usable amount of legroom and enough flexibility to correct a simple mistake were once simply understood as parts of the flight.

They were not luxuries. They were the product.

Airlines have gradually dismantled that product, reduced the basic ticket to little more than permission to occupy a seat between two airports and then sold the missing pieces back individually. The result is that passengers can now pay more overall while receiving significantly less as standard.

Depending on the airline and fare, you may be charged separately for a conventional cabin bag, checked luggage, advance seat selection, sitting beside the person you booked with, priority boarding, airport check-in, printing or replacing a boarding pass, food and drink, changing a passenger name, correcting booking details, altering your flight or adding any meaningful flexibility.

Not every one of those charges is automatically unreasonable. There is a fair argument that passengers who do not check luggage or require a meal should not have to pay for those services. But the model becomes far harder to defend when airlines start treating the basic mechanics of an ordinary journey as premium upgrades, or when passengers must pay extra simply to recover things that previous generations of travellers received as part of the ticket.

Then there are the baggage charges, and this is where the idea of an optional extra begins to get increasingly ridiculous.

Travelling carry-on only was once the obvious way to avoid baggage fees. You packed a sensible cabin-sized backpack or case, took it onto the aircraft and got on with your journey. Now the cheapest fare on many airlines may include only a small personal item that fits beneath the seat, while the sort of conventional cabin bag travellers have used for decades has been reclassified as an additional service.

Every airline can set different dimensions, of course, which means a perfectly ordinary backpack accepted without question by one carrier may suddenly become oversized on another. Discover this at the boarding gate and the charge can be vastly higher than it would have been online, leaving you with very little practical choice beyond paying whatever is demanded or not taking your bag onto the flight.

For experienced carry-on travellers especially, this is infuriating. We have already done exactly what airlines spent years telling us to do. We packed lighter, stopped checking luggage and reduced the amount of baggage being handled. The response has increasingly been to shrink the definition of hand luggage until even those travellers can be charged again.

It begins to feel less like paying for an additional service and more like paying to avoid punishment. The airline will insist that the dimensions were stated somewhere in the booking conditions and technically they were, but when allowances become ever smaller, policies differ between carriers and charges at the airport are disproportionately higher than the online price, the whole arrangement can start to feel uncomfortably close to a protection racket. Pay the extra fee or your journey suddenly becomes significantly more difficult and expensive.

And baggage is only one example.

Priority boarding is often less about receiving any meaningful priority and more about purchasing the right to bring a conventional cabin bag. Seat selection is supposedly optional, even when a family reasonably expects a parent to sit beside their own child. Airport check-in charges punish passengers who cannot or do not complete the process through an app, while name-correction and flight-change fees can sometimes appear completely disproportionate to the administrative task involved.

At some point we have to stop pretending that all of these things are really extras.

A glass of champagne is an extra. A three-course meal is an extra. Lounge access, extra entertainment or a seat that turns into a bed are extras. Carrying a reasonable cabin bag, sitting a young child beside a parent and being shown the genuine price of the journey before you are halfway through the booking process are not extravagant luxuries.

They are the basics of what most passengers reasonably expect when buying a flight.

And increasingly, regulators appear to be asking the same question.

Regulators Are Finally Pushing Back Against Airline ‘Extras’

For years, airlines have defended this model by arguing that passengers are simply paying for the services they choose to use. If you do not want to select a seat, do not pay. If you do not need a cabin bag, do not bring one. If you follow the terms and conditions, there is no problem.

That argument becomes considerably weaker when the supposed optional extra is something fundamental to making an ordinary journey.

In 2026, the UK Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation into Ryanair’s mandatory family-seat charge. Ryanair’s own terms required at least one parent to sit with children aged between two and eleven, but the adult had to pay for a reserved seat in order to do so. The CMA is examining whether that term may be unfair under consumer law and whether the unavoidable charge was properly reflected in the total price shown to passengers at the beginning of the booking process.

No finding of infringement has yet been made, but the fact that the UK’s competition regulator is asking the question at all is significant.

If an airline requires a parent to sit beside a young child, and then charges the parent for the privilege of complying with that requirement, is that genuinely an optional extra? Or has something so basic been removed from the fare that the entire concept of unbundling has become absurd?

The regulatory pushback is much wider than one Ryanair seating policy. European lawmakers have now secured a political agreement strengthening protection against ancillary charges, including clearer fares, fee-free seating for children beside accompanying adults and fares that include cabin luggage. The wider debate over air passenger rights is increasingly focused not only on delays and cancellations, but on whether airlines have been allowed to turn fundamental parts of the journey into additional revenue streams.

This matters because for years the direction of travel has been almost entirely one way. Airlines remove something from the basic fare, redefine it as an optional extra and charge passengers to get it back. The next airline follows, then the next, until a practice that would once have caused outrage becomes normal.

That is exactly what happened with checked luggage. Then advance seat selection. Then conventional cabin bags. Then family seating policies. Then increasingly restrictive fare categories and app-based check-in requirements.

The question regulators are now beginning to ask is whether there should be a floor beneath which the basic passenger experience cannot be stripped.

And frankly, it is about time.

You Get What You Pay For—But Increasingly You Pay More For Less

A cheap £50 flight can exist, and I am not expecting a first-class suite, a personal butler and a chilled bottle of Dom Pérignon when I buy one. Most passengers understand perfectly well that a cheap ticket involves compromises.

The problem is not that travellers expect luxury for the cost of lunch. The problem is that airlines have repeatedly reduced what a standard ticket provides and then charged passengers more to recover things that used to be perfectly normal.

Nowhere is this more physically obvious than the airline seat itself.

For decades, airlines have repeatedly looked for ways to fit more passengers into aircraft cabins, and one of the most obvious ways to do that is to reduce the distance between rows. As seat pitch becomes tighter, the ordinary economy seat becomes increasingly cramped. The airline can then sell seats with more space as extra-legroom or premium options, even when the additional room may simply restore some of the personal space passengers once received as standard.

That is the perfect example of paying more for less.

The standard product gets worse. The old standard becomes the premium product. Then you are asked to pay extra to get back what was taken away.

The same pattern now exists with baggage. A normal cabin bag becomes an extra. With seating, the ability to choose where you sit becomes an extra, and in the most extreme examples even sitting beside your own child can generate an additional charge. Priority boarding becomes an extra, then so many passengers buy it—or have to buy it to get the baggage allowance they need—that the priority queue starts to resemble the population of a small town.

This is not simply about passengers refusing to read the terms and conditions. Of course travellers should check the fare they are buying, understand the baggage allowance and know the rules before reaching the airport. I have been telling travellers to do exactly that for years.

But personal responsibility does not give airlines a free pass to make the basic product progressively worse.

I cannot open a restaurant, advertise a steak dinner, reveal in the small print that the steak costs extra and then blame the customer for failing to understand the offer. The fact that a condition was disclosed somewhere does not automatically make it fair or reasonable.

Just because an airline can remove something, place it behind another fare category and explain the entire arrangement on page 3,467 of the conditions does not automatically make the practice reasonable. Consumer terms still have to be fair and transparent, and compulsory charges cannot simply be dripped into the price later because the airline has decided to label them optional.

Passengers are not angry because they expect everything for free. They are angry because it increasingly feels as though they are paying more for less, while airlines repeatedly redefine yesterday’s basic service as today’s premium upgrade.

The Terms Of Flying Have Been Stretched To Breaking Point

This was the emerging problem when I first wrote this article in 2018. This was exactly what I was warning about back then, and it has since become embedded across much of the airline industry.

Airlines have extraordinary control over the conditions of travel. They decide what your fare includes, what dimensions your bag must meet, when and how you must check in, whether you may choose a seat, what flexibility you have and how much it will cost if your circumstances change.

They also hold almost all of the practical power once you reach the airport. If a member of ground staff decides your bag is outside the allowance, or the system says you have failed to follow the check-in process correctly, you generally have two immediate options: pay what is demanded or do not board the flight.

The third immediate possibility, if you challenge the decision and the situation escalates, is to be labelled disruptive, removed from the aircraft or have the police called.

At the gate, the airline is effectively judge, jury and executioner. You can be completely right and it may make absolutely no difference to the immediate outcome. Your flight is closing, your itinerary is disappearing in front of you and the person demanding payment knows you have almost no practical negotiating position. Pay now and complain later is often the only realistic choice, and even if a regulator, ombudsman or court eventually agrees with you months down the line, that does not give you back the missed flight, the ruined connection or the first two days of your trip.

That imbalance is increasingly part of the wider consumer-rights argument around airline fees. European consumer organisations have explicitly warned that airlines are increasingly charging passengers for basic needs and using practices that exploit the passenger’s position and undermine genuine price transparency. Regulators and lawmakers are now pushing back with stronger scrutiny of unfair contract terms, ancillary charges and the way the real price of a flight is presented.

Because a fee is not genuinely optional if the passenger has no realistic choice but to pay it at the point it is imposed. When one side controls whether you board the aircraft, holds all the practical power at the gate and can tell you to pay first and fight about it months later, the normal balance between a business and its customer has disappeared. That is exactly why strong passenger rights and consumer protections are needed in the first place.

Airlines need the power to keep aircraft safe. What they should not have is virtually unchecked power to define any challenge to their authority as a threat to that safety.

A fee for a genuinely optional service is one thing, but a fee attached to something most passengers need to complete an ordinary journey, or is imposed on them completely unfairly at the last minute is something else entirely.

‘Sorry mate, we’ve decided your bag that fits into the ridiculous frame we have is now too big to fly. There is a £199 surcharge. Pay up.’

‘But…’

‘Please calm down, sir, or we will have to remove you from the flight and call the police.’

In old parlance, that would look and feel remarkably close to extortion.

When the personal-item allowance keeps getting smaller while what would normally be considered a conventional sized cabin bag moves into a more expensive fare category, what was once allowed as normal is taken away from you. Airlines squeeze more rows into economy cabins and reduce seat pitch, then sell seats with the sort of legroom that used to be normal as a premium upgrade. Advance seat selection becomes another charge, priority boarding becomes tied to baggage allowances and flexibility is divided across an increasingly bewildering collection of fare categories.

Piece by piece, the standard product is reduced.

Then it is sold back to you.

Airlines are businesses. Of course they exist to make money, and most passengers understand that perfectly well. But customers are equally entitled to judge whether the final price, the quality of the journey and the way they are treated represent acceptable value.

The defence that passengers agreed to everything in the conditions is no longer enough, and regulators are making that increasingly clear. And this is precisely why regulators are beginning to intervene. The problem is no longer merely that passengers dislike the fees; it is that the airline controls the terms, the immediate decision and the consequences of challenging it.

Are Budget Airlines Really Worth It?

Sometimes, absolutely.

A budget airline can still offer outstanding value when you are taking a relatively short flight, travelling with a bag that fits comfortably within the included allowance, flying to a convenient airport, accepting a randomly allocated seat and requiring no flexibility. When the fare is genuinely low and the flight does exactly what you need, there is no reason not to take advantage of it.

For backpackers and independent travellers in particular, this can still work extremely well. Travel light, understand the baggage rules, check in when you are supposed to, refuse the extras you genuinely do not need and take the cheap seat.

Budget airlines become far less appealing when you need checked baggage, advance seat selection, flexibility or a more central airport. They are also a greater risk when the flight forms part of a self-transfer itinerary, when a delay would destroy the first few days of your trip or when the airline’s schedule leaves you paying for expensive overnight accommodation or awkward transport at either end.

A cheap ticket to a distant secondary airport may be poor value once you add the cost and time of reaching the city. A low fare with baggage added may cost more than a more inclusive alternative, while a basic ticket with no useful flexibility can become extremely expensive the moment your plans change.

This is why comparing airlines by category is becoming increasingly meaningless. A traditional airline is not automatically better value merely because it calls itself full service, particularly when its cheapest fare excludes luggage and seat selection too. Equally, a budget carrier is not automatically the cheapest simply because its headline price appears at the top of a comparison site.

You have to compare the actual tickets and the complete journey. What baggage does each fare include? Which airport does it use and how much will the transfer cost? Will you need to pay to sit together? What happens if your plans change? Is the journey protected if you are connecting to another flight? What will you spend on food, accommodation or ground transport because of the schedule?

Most importantly, what is the difference in total price once everything you genuinely need has been added?

Sometimes the budget flight will still win easily. Sometimes paying a little more at the beginning will buy a significantly easier, more comfortable and more reliable journey. And sometimes the supposedly more expensive airline will turn out to be cheaper overall.

Budget airlines changed travel for the better. They made flying accessible to millions of people and opened destinations that might otherwise have remained out of reach. I still use them, and I will continue to use them when the fare and the journey make sense.

The mistake is not booking a budget airline. The mistake is allowing an eye-catching headline fare to convince you that cheap and good value are automatically the same thing.

Budget airlines built an extraordinarily successful business model by stripping the flight back to its bare essentials and charging passengers for everything else. The smartest travellers understand that model, calculate the real cost of the entire journey and only pay for the things they genuinely need.

Use the stripped-back model on your own terms.

Exploit the model. Don’t let the model exploit you.