Major low cost carriers in Europe - Who offers the cheapest flights in Europe?

ELFAA is European Low Fares Airline Association and its mission is "To ensure that European policy and legislation promote free and equal competition to enable the continued growth and development of low fares into the future, allowing a greater number of people to travel by air.". ELFAA has nine member airlines and they collectively carry 190 million passangers every year. According to the ELFAAs statistics low fares airlines currently account for over 43% of scheduled intra-European traffic.

Current airline members of ELFAA are:

• EasyJet (United Kingdom)
• Flybe (United Kingdom)
• Jet2.com (United Kingdom)
• Norwegian Air Shuttle (Norway)
• Ryanair (Ireland)
• Sverige Flyg (Sweden)
• transavia.com (The Netherlands)
• Vueling (Spain)
• Wizz Air (Hungary)

In addition to these ELFAA member airlines there are many other airlines that can be classified as low cost carriers. For example Air Berlin "Just fly" tickets are very close to the traditional low fares business model and Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has they subsidiary Blue1 that operates as low fares airline. Latvian Air Baltic, Irish Aer Lingus and many other airlines can also be classified somewhere between traditional airlines and low fares airlines. I my blog I will cover all airlines that offer so cheap flights that I will find them worth writing.

In media Ryanair is very often the low cost carrier that is mentioned as the most agressive in cutting their costs and offering the cheapest flights. That is very often true. Ryanair clearly is positioned itself as a very pure low fares airline.

When I have searched for the cheapest flights in Europe I have found that very often Ryanair and Wizzair are the companies that use the most agressive pricing. Sometimes they offer very cheap flights to fill airplanes but they also know when to set prices high. During peak seasons such as Eastern, Christmas and European summer holidays they can be surprisingly expensive.

Where to find the cheapest flights in Europe?
If you would ask me where to find the cheapest flights in Europe I would give you an advice to look at the routes outside top 10 cities in Europe. There are many routes where you can find cheap flights like 19,99€ but the cheapest are very often the flights between smaller cities. For example my cheapest flight has been 0,99€ flight from Turku (Finland) to Gdansk (Poland). This was Wizzair flight.