Do low cost airlines offer the cheapest deals?
No, not always. Ryanair, one of Europe’s largest and most profitable low cost airline, claims it sells 70% of its seats at its two lowest fares. easyJet says that up to 50% of passengers could have paid the lowest fare.” That might be as little as $25 for a flight from Amsterdam to Geneva on easyJet or $32 from Brussels to Dublin on Ryanair, excluding taxes and handling fees. What low cost airlines are less eager to talk about is how many seats they sell at fares that are markedly higher than their cheapest offerings. Ryanair has about eight price categories; easyJet around 10. It doesn’t take a math genius to work out that between 30% and 50% of their passengers could be at the higher end, paying $300-plus per ticket. Suddenly, the so called budget airlines no longer look cheap. Nearly all airlines nowadays use a complicated system called yield management to juggle prices up and down according to demand as a means of maximizing revenue. So the more seats that have been booked on a fli
