Ryanair just turned 21, so it’s a good time to recognize their importance to discount travel. If you’re not already familiar with them, they’re the airline that frequently offers flight deals for £1.00 (taxes not included). They’re so crucial to travel that whenever they set up service for a new destination, the property values actually rise their because of the increased accessibility!

Based in Dublin, they carried over 35 million passengers to 100+ European destinations last year, many of which saved some good coin with this no frills carrier. Ryanair isn’t the most elegant, romantic flying experience, but the company boasts that they have the lowest ticket prices, least likelihood to lose luggage, least amount of tardy arrivals/departures and youngest fleet of jets. As of August 2006, they had 107 Boeing 737-800′s with an additional 142 on order to partially replace the current lot and add to it.

Ryanair is sometimes referred to as the Southwest Airlines of Europe – and this is no coincidence. Their CEO, Michael O’ Leary, actually visited the Southwest Airlines Headquarters in the early days to study their business model.

The main component to Ryanair’s profit model is revenue from ancillary activities. They just disclosed that they made £50 million in ancillary revenue in a recent three month period. Services they charge for include, booking with a credit card (£1.75), checking in your suitcase (£7.00), onboard ham sandwich (£4.00) and onboard bottled water (£1.80).

Operating solely in Europe for the last 21 years, they will be venturing outside to the continent of Africa soon, with flights to Morocco.

I recently needed to book a R/T ticket from Budapest to Phoenix. The best deals I found were with KLM/NWA for $850, but that still seemed a little high. Some more thought needed to be put into this. So I decided to dissect and run a search for each leg of the itinerary and see what it turned up. It showed that Budapest to Los Angeles was only $650 – meaning that the Los Angeles to Phoenix leg was responsible for $200 of the $850 fare!

Knowing that Southwest Airlines typically charges $100 R/T from Los Angeles to Phoenix, I just went ahead and booked the KLM/NWA BUD-LAX fare for $650. I then booked LAX-BUD for $100 on Southwest. All told, this saved me about $100 and the need to fly domestically on NWA, which has a tendency to mix stop in Memphis or Minneapolis in many of their itineraries.

When flying separate airlines just remember to leave plenty of time between flights, and if you’re checking in baggage, confirm that the airlines will transfer them to the other airline for you.

Unfortunately, for me, much of my savings went to the taxi toll to get to Ferihegy Airport.

Through my travels I’ve learned that Ryanair and EasyJet are the cheapest for flying within Europe – just as Southwest and JetBlue are for the United States.

But, what about Asia? If I wanted to hop around to Hong Kong, Beijing, Bangkok, Shanghai and Tokyo, what are the good, low-cost airlines for that? I asked around and the overall consensus was AirAsia.

I ran a query on AirAsia for Bangkok to Singapore (r/t) in mid-October and they wanted just $135 after taxes, not bad. As it turns out, AirAsia, based in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Jakarta, has the largest fleet of aircraft serving Southeast Asia and China. They’re also the Official Low Fare Airline of Manchester United – I wonder how much that licensing deal was!

Other airlines mentioned and worth considering are…
DragonAir
Tiger Airways
Lion Air
ValueAir

Here’s a good list of all the budget airlines that serve Asia.