Flying through aircraft was always considered a luxury until the advent of low cost budget airlines.Giving tough competition to the aristocratic crowd these airlines make air flying an easily affordable thing by offering prices as low as $50. The era of budget airlines originated in 70s giving middle class traveller a chance to fly at affordable rates.
Following are the common practices of budget airlines:
- Decrease in price of tickets gets substituted to other charges if you opt for any perks. Apart from the tickets if you order food or beverages, ask for space for baggage, choice of seat or priority boarding then you need to pay for it all.
- Payments of extra perk are the sources of extra income to the budget airlines. Payment of all these stuff compensate the discounted fare.
- Low cost budget airlines have single type of aircraft offering single passenger class. The flights are also of old models and are fuel efficient planes. Minimum set of equipment is used in these planes to reduce maintenance cost.
- Less equipments keeps the weight of the craft lighter which saves fuel. Maintenance and cleaning cost gets reduced as seats don't have rear pockets and have no reclining facility.
- In-flight entertainment systems are an absolute NO. Such amenities would add extra cost on the tickets.
- There is no option of reserved seat which compel passengers to board early which reduces the total turn around time.
- Low cost budget airlines opt to land at secondary airports where there is less traffic to avoid delay due to traffic at the airport. They offload passengers and take new in short span of time to utilise time.
- The staff is subjected to do multiple tasks saving the fees for training and crew cost per passenger. Moreover, there are no agents (so no extra commission), the tickets have to be booked online.
All these practices save a lot of operational cost making room for highly competitive budget airlines. Thus, low fare airlines are lucrative business and earn fare amount of profits by economising the operational cost.
