Airlines Deals

The flight
British Airways (0870 850 9850; www.ba.com) took on the low-cost airlines with ferocity last week by increasing the number of seats available on its low-cost flights into Europe by 500 per cent. Two million more tickets, priced from £29 one-way will be available year-round, and prices on dozens of routes have been dropped by up to 50 per cent. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Geneva, Madrid and Toulouse now have fares from £29 each way, and Naples, Pisa, Verona and Varna start at £34. Further flung destinations, including Izmir, Dubrovnik and Thessaloniki, begin at £44 one-way.

The rip-off

A nice selection of ham sandwiches, some pickled eggs, a flask of squash and a tupperware box of sausage rolls used to constitute a feast of a picnic. But now the classic summer meal has been taken to a ridiculous level of extravagance by chef Craig Sherrington of Lake Windemere’s Storrs Hall Hotel (www.elh.co.uk) After finding the perfect spot in the hotel’s 17 acres of gardens, guests can wait for their hamper of foie gras, beluga caviar, British rare white beef, Scottish lobster and fruit trifle with gold-leaf shavings, plus bottles of Cristal Champagne and Chateau Lafite-Rothschild to be delivered. The price? A mere £1,567 for two people.

The product

Casio has a new watch which it hopes will become the serious walker’s best friend. The Pro Trek PRG-60 is solar-powered, has a built in barometer so you can track upcoming weather, altimeter, thermometer and digital compass. It costs £239.99. Call 020 8208 7813 for stockists; www.casio.co.uk

The book

Rather than stuff your suitcase with all those paperbacks you’ve been meaning to read all year, you can now download more than 10,000 titles from www.audible.co.uk Biographies, classics, children’s books and more can be bought individually in abridged and unabridged versions which can be burnt to CD or played on music players. Or a year’s membership including two titles a month and an iPod Shuffle costs £14.99 a month.

The airport

A new wellbeing club has opened in the departure lounge of Heathrow’s terminal one. Rejuve (020 7958 1718; www.rejuve.info) includes an exercise area, eight treatment rooms offering revitalising massages, a barber and nutrition area selling juices and salads. A day’s membership costs £25.

The luxury retreat

Pencalenick, a luxury self-catering property in the Cornish town of Fowey is now available as a holiday rental, and couldn’t be further from the traditional country cottage in appearance … and price.

The stunning house has a seeded grass roof, timber frame and is constructed from glass and steel to appreciate the natural light and uninterrupted seaviews. Up to 16 guests can stay, and the use of a 40ft classic motor boat with skipper, plus an in-house chef are included in the £2,000-a-day price tag. Contact 020 7747 6858; www.pencalenickhouse.com

The website

Over half of Britons take a UK holiday each year, but the founders of The Real Visitors Book are peeved at the lack of advice about them compared with foreign breaks. They are calling for holidaymakers to write holiday reviews for their website, www.therealvisitorsbook.co.uk

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FOR decades, the budget traveller in Europe accepted that the necessary but painful core of the experience was covering the distance between the glittering capitals either wedged in the seat of a bus designed for tiny people, crawling through the industrial district of some hell-hole at 3am, or sharing a Kombi with a Dutch hippie named Wim with a theory about Frank Zappa and the moon landings.

But that’s all changed in the past 10 years. The cheap-flight revolution began in the late 1990s and now the continent is crisscrossed with every conceivable route, from the big capitals to disused military airports put back into service. With proper planning you can save hundreds of dollars on a holiday, but it takes a bit of work and lateral thinking.
1. Set aside a few hours for research: There are about a dozen notable cheap airlines and a range of more obscure ones, and the best way to get a good deal (if you are a little flexible about destination and date) is to compare as many as possible and try a few route combinations with different airlines. This is best done manually, website by website. There are several websites that purport to find the cheapest available flights but they’re rarely completely up to date (prices can change within a day), and they often don’t include the smaller airlines.

The largest of the cheap airlines is Irish carrier Ryanair, with a network centred on London, Dublin, Barcelona and Berlin. It is aggressively trying to cement its leading position, building customer loyalty by offering free flights – that is, for one €cent, plus about €10 ($17) in taxes.

Second largest is Easyjet, the company that really kick-started the low-cost flight revolution, but it certainly isn’t the cheapest player on the market. Other carriers have their specialties – Skyeurope, for example, is centred on Bratislava, the otherwise dispensable capital of Slovakia, and great for southeastern Europe. Wizzair specialises in Poland and surrounds. BMI Baby flies from regional British cities to Europe and has no flights out of London except for a few British Airways services.

2. Be thorough: There are many valid reasons why a really cheap flight could be lurking amid a range of more expensive ones. A carrier may be offering a destination at, say, €60 including taxes for 12 or 13 days and, right in the middle, there’s one for €5. Why? Who knows? Maybe there was a one-way charter booked. Maybe it’s a plane that has to be rerouted to get the schedule back in kilter. Keep various websites open in multiple windows, and jump from site to site. It’s worthwhile keeping notes as you go to avoid getting lost in a variety of options.

Two carriers that save research time by having an automatic lowest-fare search function are Jet2 and Thomsonfly. Unfortunately, most of their flights leave from Leeds or Sheffield, respectively. The others make you trawl, presumably in the hope you’ll tire and book a mid-price fare.

3. Be flexible with dates and cities: The cheapest flights are at least a couple of weeks out and usually, but not always, in the early morning. Be flexible about destinations, too: many such flights are cheap because they are going to underused airports, and it’s worth looking at the cities close to where you want to go and considering nearby alternatives.

If you can find a cheap flight from London to Madrid, for example, well, congratulations, you don’t need to read any further, but otherwise you might try flying into Santander (in the north of Spain) or Valladolid. Never heard of either? No matter: they are a two-hour or three-hour train ride or drive from Madrid, and flights there from Britain should be at rock-bottom prices.

The alternative gateway strategy is particularly useful in countries with multiple destinations and cheap local transport, such as Portugal and Poland.

You can even fly into one country to get to another – for instance, the best way into Andalusia in Spain might be to take a flight to the Portuguese city of Faro, where a bus ticket or car rental to Seville will be much cheaper than flying direct.

But beware the idiosyncrasies of local transport networks. It’s easy to be too clever by half and arrive in Szczecin just after the departure of the twice-weekly train to Warsaw.

4. Make careful note of where the airports actually are: Many airports are only nominally in the city listed as their destination. Flying to Grenoble gets you to Lyons and a shuttle bus. The classic is Frankfurt, as what you’re actually flying into is an airport called Frankfurt (Hahn), a couple of hundred kilometres from the city, with a half-dozen cities closer to it than the one after which it is named. Factoring in the cost of getting to the airport is crucial: it may well be more expensive than the actual flight.

5. Be careful booking multiple-leg journeys: The low-cost airlines are point-to-point, which means that even if you’re connecting via the same airline, it won’t automatically rebook a flight you missed because an earlier one was late. This is particularly important in winter when fog in Europe’s north can delay takeoff by hours. Most airlines will rebook at a cost – as much as pound £40 ($100) – that could be more than the actual ticket.

Ideally, aim to arrive in the early morning and leave late afternoon from the same airport (landing in Stansted and taking off from Gatwick is to be avoided at all costs), thus saving the cost of a hotel.

6. Book return flights well ahead: It’s easy to grab a cheap outward flight, forget to book a return and suddenly realise the only flights available have skyrocketed to full commercial prices. One solution, if your return date isn’t all that definite, is to book multiple return flights. It may seem crazy but it’s cheaper to book flights costing €15 out on, say, three consecutive Tuesday mornings six weeks ahead, rather than waiting until two days before you go and then paying €150. (Of course, you won’t be refunded for unused seats.)

Once you get over the weirdness of booking flights as if you were betting on a roulette table, you’ll see it makes sense.

7. Be lateral: It might be cheaper and quicker to fly in a V-shape than to take a train between two destinations. It may well be easier to get from Esbjerg in Denmark to Gothenburg in Sweden – and who among us hasn’t needed to – by flying into and out of Geneva (on different carriers) than it would be to take the two trains necessary to get there.

8. Be open-minded: One of the best things about the cheap-flight era is that it has opened up cities we might otherwise never have considered. Be willing to take pot luck and go where the cheap fares lead you. Who knew that the Pyrenees city of Pau would be such a mysterious border town? Or how about Lubeck in Germany, the city that invented marzipan and seems to run on it still? But don’t feel too much like a carefree jetsetter: Ryanair has introduced a policy of charging extra for non-cabin luggage and other carriers are likely to follow.

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On their face, the numbers are stunning, especially since Greensboro is not near the North Pole or the tropics. Piedmont Triad International Airport is surpassed only by five airports, including those in Alaska and Hawaii, as places where airfares increased by the biggest percentage from 1995-2006.

And in the past year, Greensboro saw the second-largest percentage increase of airfares in the nation between the first quarter of 2005 and the first quarter of 2006, according to a recent federal study of airfares.

But don’t let the numbers fool you: plenty of airports, like Roanoke for example, have higher fares, say people who prepare and interpret the figures.

“The fact that you lost … low-cost airlines and have zero today is your big problem,” said Tom Parsons, the founder of www.bestfares.com, an Internet travel site. “Other airports probably have worse airfares than you but because they never had the low-cost airlines in the first place, yours just shows very very high.”

Beginning in 1994, when Continental Airlines established a hub here that offered “peanuts fares,” prices dropped at PTI and passenger boardings soared to nearly double what they are today.

That drew AirTran, another discounter. Despite the fact that Continental dropped the hub in 1996, AirTran — and, later, Independence Air — helped keep fares low.

In late 2004, AirTran dropped service to PTI. A year later, Independence went out of business.

What’s left are the traditional airlines with fewer discounts, including United, Delta and US Airways.

At airports like Raleigh-Durham International, where Southwest Airlines offers consistent discounts, the other carriers must keep prices lower to compete. Here, they’re not facing the same competition. On top of that, those carriers have raised fares 19 times since January 2005, Parsons said.

“Raleigh has experienced fare hikes too,” Parsons said, “but those fares only stick where there is no competition from low-fare carriers.”

Passengers who fly out of PTI, then, are keeping prices low for other airports by paying higher fares here.

“You’re one of those airports, what we call a small regional airport, that subsidizes the rest of the USA,” Parsons said.

The overall increase here happened despite US Airways’ strategy to lower fares on many flights out of PTI in February.

PTI’s staff and board meet with the airlines often.

“We’re very mindful of the fact that fares are important to people,” said Henry Isaacson, chairman of the Piedmont Triad Airport Authority. “They’re important to us and we are ever vigilant about that and we do what we can.

“The airlines will do what they want to do in the final analysis. But we put a lot of pressure on them to keep their fares competitive and stay somewhat in line with our sister airports.”

The lack of competition is even worse in Anchorage, said Parsons. And Hawaii’s prices are high because it’s such a popular tourist destination, said Steve Anderson, a transportation specialist at the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, who prepared the fare surveys.

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Istanbul is set to be the next big weekend break destination with the launch of the first Easyjet flights there on Tuesday. The city will be the airline’s third destination outside the European Union - flights to Marrakesh, and Split and Rijeka in Croatia were launched this summer.
The move is part of a growing trend for low-cost airlines to expand their networks outside the EU. Thomsonfly is to add Marrakesh to its timetable in November, and last week Ryanair announced it would also fly to Marrakesh and Fez, plus the Croatian town of Pula in October.

Samantha Day, Easyjet’s public relations manager, said: ‘Historically, low-cost airlines have only expanded in the EU because it’s a lot simpler, as the countries share the same regulations and legislation. But people are getting more adventurous and the potential of places like Istanbul make the added complications worth it.’

The Easyjet flights from Luton cost from £61 return on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays until September, when they will become daily. ‘It’s the only city that embraces two continents so is very attractive as a city break, and will also act as a gateway to a coast which is very popular for holidaymakers and second-home owners,’ said Day.

Aside from the historical sites such as the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace, and the bellydancing, bazaars and kebabs, the Turkish tourist board is keen to promote Istanbul’s modern cultural scene. It now has its own Time Out guide, a new Ritz Carlton hotel, and nightclubs, bars and designer clothes shops to rival any western city.

Jamie Dunford Wood, managing director of Travel Intelligence, which offers high-end hotels around the world, said: ‘Boutique hotels first established themselves in Istanbul in 2003. Today, the most chic is the 18-room Sumahan on the Water. It is one step ahead of the game by being in a peaceful location on the shores of the Bosporus slightly away from the city centre.’

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Attention passengers: Your air carrier would like to thank you for paying more for your ticket - and sitting in a middle seat - this summer.

Despite a huge rise in fuel prices, airlines made more money in the second quarter than any time since 2000. Strong demand for travel allowed them to raise fares as they cut the number of flights and available seats. Also helping were sharp reductions in labor costs and in debt for airlines that are or were under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Yesterday, US Airways became the latest carrier to report a second-quarter profit, a feat even United Airlines says it will achieve just five months after it emerged from more than three years in Chapter 11.

US Airways Group Inc., which made $305 million in the three months ended June 30, joined AirTran ($32 million), American ($291 million), Continental ($198 million), Southwest ($333 million) and others in reporting quarterly profit. United is scheduled to report its earnings Monday.

W. Douglas Parker, US Airways chairman and chief executive officer, said in announcing its earnings that while other carriers were making money, “no other airline has experienced an improvement as dramatic as US Airways’.”

US Airways is Philadelphia’s dominant carrier, with more than 60 percent of the flights and passengers and more than 5,000 employees based here.

US Airways executives said they expected to make money in the third quarter, which typically is the industry’s best because of heavy summer travel, and for the full year. A full year in the black would be US Airways’ first since 1999.

The carrier recorded second-quarter net income of $3.25 a share on revenue of $3.19 billion. Because US Airways emerged from bankruptcy in September after a merger with America West Airlines, its financials are not directly comparable with the previous year’s results for the two predecessor airlines.

Increasing airfares has been the airlines’ ticket to profitability.

This week, the older hub-and-spoke airlines raised their one-way fares an additional $5, the seventh time this year they have increased prices. Low-cost carriers, including AirTran and Southwest, have also pushed up fares in several steps, usually by a little less than the older airlines.

The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics said this week that its air-travel price index, which measures changes in ticket prices on identical routings each quarter, rose 10.3 percent in the first three months of the year, the largest increase since the start of the index in 1995.

Analysts estimate that airlines this year will take in 11 percent more in revenue per passenger mile flown than a year ago, while filling more than 80 percent of their available seats. Historically, planes have taken off with 70 percent to 75 percent of the seats occupied.

US Airways Group’s revenue per passenger mile increased even more than the industry average, at 29 percent on the US Airways portion of its route system, and 19 percent on the America West portion. The two parts of the airline are still largely separate, awaiting new labor agreements on how the workforces will be merged.

Roger King, an airline analyst with CreditSights in Norwalk, Conn., predicted earlier this year that airlines would continue raising fares and squeezing more people onto each flight “until passengers cry uncle and call Greyhound.”

But that point has not been reached, King said this week. “At some point, at a certain price, people are going to stop flying,” he said. “What that price is is to be determined.”

US Airways’ profit, which slightly beat analysts’ estimates, did not lift investors’ spirits. Shares of the airline, based in Tempe, Ariz., fell $3.14 yesterday, or 6 percent, to close at $47.99.

The industry’s profits in the quarter come despite oil prices that are more than a third higher than they were a year ago. Jet fuel now is the largest expense category for US Airways and some other carriers, in large part because of deep pay cuts, the elimination of pension costs, and staff reductions at airlines reorganizing in Bankruptcy Court.

Much of the industry’s ability to cope with the higher fuel bills is due to cutbacks in the number of available flights and airplane seats by airlines that have been through bankruptcy, analysts and airline executives said.

“It’s not great management,” Parker said in a conference call with analysts, referring to the whole industry. “As seats have gone away, you’ve seen fares go up.”

Analysts and other industry observers said that it was too early to know if business travelers, who have also seen their hotel and car-rental costs rise this year, would cut back on travel in the fall because of the higher fares.

Kevin P. Mitchell, chairman of the Radnor-based Business Travel Coalition, said it was heartening to see that low-cost airlines had expanded so much since 2000 that competition was setting ticket prices on most routes. In the late 1990s, the older carriers had more pricing power, in part because they kept newer airlines at bay on many of their most lucrative monopoly routes, he said.

“Low-cost carriers are offering very broad market discipline,” Mitchell said. “True supply and demand is setting prices, not anticompetitive behavior.”

For leisure travelers, resistance to higher airfares is likely to depend on other economic factors, including whether spending on new automobiles and other consumer durables slows down, and whether interest rates continue to rise.

“If that happens, that’s going to be a signal consumers are running out of borrowing capacity,” said airline consultant John V. Pincavage of Pincavage & Associates in Westport, Conn. “And if that happens, what’s the easiest thing to curtail? A trip.”

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The low-cost airlines had nearly 3m passengers in the first six months of the year. It may be hard for them to repeat the growth rates.

The first half of this year was the best in the history. Low-costs had nearly 3m passengers. In 2005, they had 3.2m passengers (12 months). This year they will more than double their results.

WizzAir remains the leader. It had 1m passengers in the first half of the year, nearly two times more (92.08 percent) than in the same period of last year. The Hungarian company plans to have 2m clients in the year. It has a big rival however. Irish Ryanair, the most expansive airline in Poland, is also planning to have 2m passengers this year. In the first six months of the year, it had 920,500 passengers, or 2,722 percent more than a year earlier. Centralwings, the low-cost owned by LOT, the Polish flag carrier, increased the number of passengers by 137 percent to 329,000. Germanwings and SkyEurope have over 15-percent growth rates (they had 101,000 and 260,000 passengers respectively). EasyJet, which globally is Ryanair’s rival, was the only airline to have the same number of passengers (210,000).

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Deccan Aviation, which operates the low-cost carrier Air Deccan, will start its international operations out of Sri Lanka in October this year. Deccan has chosen its Sri Lankan arm, Deccan Aviation (Lanka) to kickstart its international operations because Indian domestic carriers cannot fly overseas unless they have a 5 year experience of flying in the domestic market.
They must also have a fleet-size of at least 20 aircraft.Air Deccan, which launched India’s first low cost airline service in August, 2003, does not qualify on the basis of number of years until August 2008 but with a fleet of 36 aircraft, it already fulfills the other criterion.Initially the services will connect the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo to the southern Indian cities of Trivandrum, Madurai, Coimbatore, Cochin and Trichi.Three ATR turbo-prop aircrafts will be deployed on the route.“We have already applied for the required licences from the government of Sri Lanka. Plans will only be finalised after we visit the country next month,” Air Deccan managing director GR Gopinath told FE

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However, they were not looking at any other international market at present,he said.“The domestic market in India offers tremendous growth opportunities. I am not even trying to compete with other low-cost airlines but with the Indian Railways. If I can lure even 10% of train passengers to airlines industry, it will be a major push for the low cost carriers,”Gopinath said.

At present,Deccan is flying to 56 destinations and claims to be the second largest airline by marketshare, next only to Jet Airways.

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QANTAS chief executive Geoff Dixon does not expect high fuel prices to damage the prospects of low-cost carrier Jetstar International when it launches in November.
Mr Dixon said yesterday he did not believe that high fuel costs meant low-cost airlines could not survive, although carriers that were not well run might well hit trouble.

He said Qantas was aware of the risks involved with fuel rises but it had a highly developed risk management system. “Fuel affects all airlines but at the moment with certain difficulties, we’re managing it through,” he said.

“Obviously, there’s a certain amount of hedging, which is not great at the moment, but the surcharges are offsetting a lot of this.

“And it’s interesting, the surcharges are a fare increase but travel is still very, very buoyant in most of the industry.”

Mr Dixon said Qantas was not discussing another fuel surcharge, although it was keeping a close watch on prices.

Jetstar International attracted an avalanche of web hits when launched commercially yesterday with international promotional fares as low as $169 one-way to Bali.

The launch, which was mirrored in Osaka and Bangkok, is part of the group’s strategy of developing two brands.

Qantas will use Jetstar to fly services on leisure routes and keep mainline services on those where there is a leisure and premium market.

It will start service with four two-class A330-200s, adding another two next year before switching to next-generation Boeing 787 Dreamliners.

Mr Dixon told tourism, travel and airline officials at the Sydney launch that Jetstar’s international service would be grown aggressively and that this would focus on developing inbound markets.

“At the end of the day, Jetstar International when it’s fully fledged will be principally an inbound carrier and I believe it will be of tremendous importance to the Australian tourism industry,” he said.

The Qantas boss also hit back at a push by a Queensland airport, tourism and marketing group to put pressure on the federal Government to further open Australian skies.

He said Australia could not have it all ways.

He said reports that Austrian Airlines had decided to abandon its Australian services highlighted problems with the viability of operations by end-point carriers competing against mid-point airlines.

“They insist that Qantas keeps all its jobs in Australia, keeps all its engineering operations in Australia, is virtually not allowed to consolidate like any other business and is also quite hampered in its ability to fly to various places because of bilateral agreements with other countries,” he said.

“But we’re then supposed to exist in this pure competitive world which doesn’t exist anywhere in the airline industry.”

Asked about the delays to the A380, Mr Dixon said the airline was still in talks with manufacturers about aircraft to replace the extra capacity provided by the big jets.

He said Airbus was still saying it would deliver the first Qantas A380 in October and the airline was happy with the way the jet was meeting its specifications in tests.

But there was no move at Qantas to follow the example of Singapore Airlines and order the redesigned A350 as well as 787s.

Figures released yesterday by the International Air Transport Association appeared to back up Mr Dixon’s optimism for Jetstar International. The figures showed international passenger traffic rose 6.7 per cent in the first half of 2006 and freight traffic grew 5.2 per cent.

Passenger load factors were also up compared with last year, rising 1.2 percentage points to 75.1percent.

Asia-Pacific passenger traffic rose 6.2 per cent while freight was up 4.8 per cent.

International Air Transport Association director general Giovanni Bisignani warned that near record oil prices would result in a $US112 billion ($147.4 billion) fuel bill for the global industry this year at an average price of $US66 a barrel. “The good news is that neither the extraordinary price of oil nor the inching-up of interest rates negatively impacted on demand,” he said.

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IRISH Ferries has started a battle with the low-cost airlines in a major tug-of-war for customers.

Ireland’s largest ferry company has promised to take on airlines like Ryanair and easyjet their own game by adopting a low-fares model.

In an unprecedented move the ferry company itself as a low-fares carrier — similar to the Ryanair model. And Irish Ferries has also followed the airline’s lead by offering big savings to those who book early.

Its new pricing model gives bigger savings for those who book at least four weeks prior to travel.

Irish Ferries’ British passenger manager Darragh O’Reilly said: “Gone are the traditional days of price vultures waiting until the last minute to book travel to take advantage of our low, low prices. From now on people will have to book in advance to guarantee getting our best price. And indeed if they do try to book at the last minute they will find that our prices have risen just as happens with the low-cost airlines.

“This represents a massive investment in our commitment to the future and the new pricing levels. We are dedicated to offering this pricing model consistently.”

The company said they had taken on board what their passengers were asking for and developed a fluid pricing structure which emulates the best elements of airline systems while retaining the traditional Irish Ferries’ offering.

Customers can choose from several alternative crossings as well as having the choice of a club class seat and individual cabins.

And they said that unlike the airlines all taxes were included in the quoted fare and customers could bring as much baggage as they like.

Mr O’Reilly said: “Exploring Ireland is best done by car.

“You can take yourself out of the city off the beaten track and into some of the most beautiful countryside in the world.”

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Are “no-frills,” or low-cost, long- haul flights now a reality? At issue is the future shape of a new wave of low-cost, long-haul carriers and whether the short-haul model can successfully translate to long-haul requirements. This issue will be debated by more than 40 airline executives at the World Low Cost Airlines Congress’s annual conference in London in September.

The conference comes just before the start-up budget carrier Oasis Hong Kong Airlines begins flights in October. Its one-way fares between London Gatwick and Hong Kong will be £75, or about $135, plus taxes. This is less than half the cost of a standard round-trip train ticket from London to Manchester.

The airline will be competing directly with British Airways, Cathay Pacific and Virgin Atlantic on the route. (BA’s lowest round trip is £389.)

Oasis Hong Kong Airlines (www.oasis-air.com) will operate Boeing 747-400s; seat-back entertainment and hot meals will be included in the ticket price, but passengers can order a “gourmet food service” at extra cost. Seat-pitch, a knee-crunching 82 centimeters, or 32 inches, is better than cattle class with many airlines. (A business-class cabin offers 154 centimeters of leg room.) The carrier plans nonstop services between Hong Kong, and Milan-Malpensa, Cologne/Bonn and destinations in the United States (Oakland in California and Chicago).

Oasis Hong Kong Airlines is joining an expanding band of carriers seeking to replicate on a global scale the no- frills model so successful in Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific.

Zoom Airlines (www.flyzoom.com), a Canadian carrier, offers low-cost services between London Gatwick, Glasgow and Manchester and Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Edmonton, Ottawa, Calgary, Halifax and Winnipeg, with one-way fares starting at £129. Zoom operates the wide-body Boeing 767-300 with 268 seats. Economy passengers get an 80-centimeter seat pitch but free meals and drinks; premium economy passengers get 92 centimeters of leg room and extra baggage allowance. One-way tickets are flexible: you can change flights up to 21 days before departure for a fee of 50 Canadian dollars, or about $43. A quick search came up with round-trip fares from London to Toronto for two dates in August of £109-£149 in economy class and £188- £228 in premium economy.

Air Sahara, based in New Delhi (www.airsahara.net), operates a network of services within the subcontinent, and between New Delhi and London or New Delhi and Singapore. One- way fares from London Heathrow to New Delhi start at around £126.

The Scottish airline Flyglobespan (www.flyglobespan.com) operates a fleet of wide-body Boeing 767-300s with three classes: no-frills economy with a 78-centimeter seat pitch (you buy your own meals and drinks); premium economy with an 88-centimeter pitch and full meals service; and business, with 128-centimeter sleeper seats. Flyglobespan operates from Glasgow and Edinburgh to a score of European destinations; from Glasgow to Orlando, Florida; Liverpool to New York Newark; Manchester to Cape Town and Toronto. One-way fares from Glasgow to Orlando start at £99; premium economy, £129; and business class, £324.

No-frills carriers are modeled on Southwest Airlines in the United States.

An expanding band of carriers are seeking to replicate the no-frills model on a global scale.

They are characterized by point-to- point services, high utilization of aircraft, low distribution costs, achieved with online booking, and variable one- way fares that reflect demand for flights at different dates and times of the day. Such has been the success of carriers like EasyJet, Ryanair, Air Berlin and German Wings, that “full-service” airlines like Air France, SAS Swiss and British Airways have adopted similar low-cost, one-way pricing on short-haul routes in Europe.

Aer Lingus, meanwhile, says it has reinvented itself as a low-cost point- to-point carrier and offers cheap one- way fares from Britain and Ireland to North America at about a quarter of the cost of full-service airlines.

Analysts have long debated whether the no-frills formula can work with long-haul services, if only because quick aircraft turnarounds can be frustrated by issues of safety, time- zone constraints, and crew schedules. And, of course, there is the discomfort issue: Will passengers tolerate being jammed for eight hours?

Airlines also need to offer some comforts on long flights, and “pay-per- frill” - like charging for priority boarding and disembarking, in-flight use of mobile phones, extra leg room and baggage allowance, and gourmet meals - might be the answer. Look out for hybrid premium seats or cabins, not as fancy (or pricey) as the ergonomic lie-flat sleeper seats in first- and business-class cabins of the big name carriers, but at least as comfortable as those old first-class seats in the narrow body Boeing 707s and DC 8s of the late 1960s.

We may have to wait for the Airbus A380 superjumbo before the idea of long-haul, no-frills flying really takes off. It was the extra capacity of the wide-body Boeings on short- and long- haul routes in the 1970s that led to low fares and today’s cattle class.

Southwest Airlines’s trial of pre-assigned seating is welcomed by most passengers; there are, however, complaints about getting stuck in the middle seat. Meanwhile, EasyJet, which also has “free seating,” is considering allowing passengers to pay a £5 supplement to be first to board.

Business travelers fear that mobile phones in flight will spark air rage. This is the finding of a poll, published June 28, by the International Airline Passengers Association. Although 90 percent of respondents carry mobile phones when they travel, only half say they would find it useful to make calls during a flight and many were opposed, saying that phones would be disruptive. Indeed, 45 percent of respondents ranked listening to someone else’s phone calls as the second most irritating thing they could imagine on an aircraft, worse than listening to a child crying or a passenger snoring. The only thing more annoying was someone kicking the back of their seat. A few said they would refuse to travel on aircraft that allowed the use of mobile phones.

The IAPA poll reflects the findings of a recent Skytrax survey of airline passengers from 76 countries (www.airlinequality.com). It found that nearly 90 percent of people are opposed to plans to allow the use of mobile phones in the air.

Meanwhile, technology developed by OnAir (a joint venture between Airbus and SITA, an airline communications provider) is now in place to allow people to safely use their mobile phones in the air. Air France has announced plans to carry out trials on its Airbus 380s between March and September 2007 on services in Europe and to North Africa. OnAir has signed agreements for new voice-mail technology with TAP Air Portugal and BMI International. According to SITA, 44 percent of airlines will be offering at least one in-flight communications option by the end of 2007.

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