Low-fare European carriers are waging a battle for supremacy in the skies over Britain and the Continent, and bargain shoppers are the early winners. Dozens of these airlines have made it cheaper than ever to book intra-European flights. Once accessible largely to Europeans, these fares are now available to anyone, thanks to the Internet.
The competition is intense among these carriers. Ryanair, a low-fare airline based in Dublin, Ireland, in July offered 100,000 seats at about 56 cents, plus taxes and fees. Airlines are even giving away seats (plus taxes and fees) on hotly contested or slow-selling routes.
"We use the announcements [of promotional fares] to annoy our competitors," said John Rowley, spokesman for Ryanair, who called his company the "Southwest Airlines of Europe."
Here's the catch, though: Those promotional fares are one-way, and the company makes up some revenue on the return flight, he said.
Of the dozens of low-fare airlines listed on such travel Web sites as www.johnnyjet.com, Ryanair and London-based easyJet are two of the largest. They carried more than 3.5 million passengers in June; Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, whose low-fare business model they are emulating, carried 5.9 million passengers in the same month.
Such low fares are possible partly because of the high percentage of reservations made on the Web. In June, 90% of easyJet's and 94% of Ryanair's bookings were through their Web sites. (Almost half of Southwest's 2002 revenue was generated through its Web site.) Like Southwest, the European carriers make tickets available only through their own Web sites.
Consumers reap the savings in sales commissions and fees the carriers otherwise would have to pay to third parties. (These airlines maintain phone reservation lines, but the lowest fares are available only online.)
The growing popularity of low-fare European airlines translates to good news if you are using the Internet to plan a European vacation. One-way airfares, once prohibitively expensive, are now competitive with European train fares.
Cheap isn't always convenient, some travelers find. London's Stansted Airport, for example, is well served by the low-fare airlines but is about 40 miles from the city center, and its public transportation links aren't as good as Heathrow's.
