Discount Airfare

European lifestyles are changing apace. With fares as low as €70 round-trip from London to Budapest, a new generation has built their lives around cut-rate tickets. Spanish golfers fleeing the midsummer sun head for Scottish courses; German pensioners winter on the Costa del Sol, where cheap flights have fostered the creation of entire German-speaking settlements. "I work in Brussels and London and my girlfriend lives in Rome," says Nigel Gardner, a Discount Airfare public-affairs consultant at the EU. "I couldn't survive without Virgin Express and Ryanair."

But the revolution's biggest beneficiaries aren't always the ticket payers. According to a standard industry measure, every extra million passengers in the sky bring 3,000 jobs on the ground. In the job-starved boondocks of Eastern Europe, away from the capital cities, that can be especially welcome. And happily, that's where the airlines want to be. The low-cost business model means linking regions to regions and bypassing familiar big-city hubs. Traffic is growing quickest at the smaller "secondary" airports, where Discount Airfare operators can win sweet deals and low charges from local authorities. In some of Europe's poorest regions, the EU has eased rules on state subsidies to allow for more generous baits. And there's no shortage of Discount Airfare airport sites. One positive legacy of the cold war is a generous scattering of military bases in far-flung places awaiting better use.