How wrong I was. The skies of Europe are a very different place to what I had imagined - and it's the low-cost carriers which rule the day. You can often find flights to almost anywhere in Europe for the same as a bus or a train, or sometimes even less - and the plane will do it far quicker than the bus, and often even than the train too. When you are trying to cram a trip into a weekend like I often was, time becomes a factor and therefore flying wins out. If you're trying to do it on a budget or at least as cheap as possible like I was, you go with whoever is cheapest. So I became very well acquainted with the low-cost carriers, who make their money by offering as low-or-no frills a service as they possibly can but charge you for any extra's. They manage to keep fares low by flying plane fleets consisting of one type of aeroplane, so everything's the same and all the parts are the same. Their planes of choice? The 737's and the A320's! And there was always lots of choice, and if there was only one airline flying between the origin and destination you wanted to go to, 99% of the time you can bet on it being a low-cost carrier too. Sometimes, maybe you didn't particularly know where you wanted to go any given weekend, so you'd idly search the flight aggregator website Skyscanner and see what might be possible and also cheap for those dates, or sale fares with the low-cost carriers. That's how we ended up going to Riga, Latvia which hadn't been on our radar of places at all, or Romania. It was often cheaper to fly International than domestic too, and given the size of European countries it was often more time-efficient to catch the train for the same price by the time you factored in check-in times at the airport.
How much of my OE was spent with my bum on a plane seat? I can't actually tell you a time figure, but I can tell you how many times I flew and with what airline - a grand total of 96 flights (doesn't include any flights in or between NZ and Aus in the course of the OE):
Ryanair - 24, 737-800 Easyjet - 18, A319, A320 Airberlin - 10, A320, A321, A330-300 Norwegian - 7, 737-800 British Airways - 3, 767-300, A320, E190 Etihad - 3, A340-600, 777-300ER Pegasus - 3, A320, A320neo, 737-800 SAS - 3, 737-600, 737-700, 737-800 Vueling - 3, A320 Aer Lingus - 2, A320 Brussels Airlines - 2, A319, A320 Eurowings - 2, A320 | Flybe - 2, ATR-72, Q400 Transavia - 2, 737-800 WizzAir - 2, A320 Virgin Australia - 2, 777-300ER Air France - 1, A320 Croatia Airlines - 1, A319 Delta Airlines - 1, A320 Dniproavia - 1, ERJ-145 Germania - 1, 737-700 Monarch - 1, A320 SWISS - 1, CS300/A220 Ukraine International Airlines - 1, E190 |
Ryanair and Easyjet are the two biggest low-cost carriers by far. When I was in the UK they were often slightly cheaper than Ryanair, but while living in Germany Ryanair was the cheaper of the two. Generally I quite liked Easyjet - it was not much different to flying Jetstar, even down to the liberal use of orange everywhere, and they were consistent and on time. The one thing which did grind my gears was Easyjet's enforced 1 bag in the cabin policy - you couldn't take a smaller bag, they'd make you stuff it into your bigger bag but all you'd do was take it out again when on the plane so why did they bother with it? Ryanair let you take on a smaller bag, and although their yellow-accented interior and seats with no seat pockets was a bit jarring, initially I thought they were the better of the two even though I knew Ryanair had a reputation. They did have a completely arbitrary "Visa Check" policy which no other airline did, where if you had a foreign passport you had to go to the counter and get your boarding pass (which you print out at home or get charged £50 for them to print it for you!) checked, otherwise they could refuse entry to the plane when boarding. Over time though, they turned the screws - they purposely started people booked on the same booking in completely different parts of the plane, so if you wanted to sit next to each other you had to pay to choose your seats. Not long before we left Europe, they were making you pay for "Priority Boarding" to be able to take any cabin bag on the plane, else they'd take it from you at the gate and put it in the hold for free (pretty sure they charge for this now). I'd long grown sick of their boarding process which always entailed standing in 3 queues (what I called the Ryanair Shuffle) in order to get on the plane, and their tactic of going from "Await Boarding" straight to "Final Call" only for you to wait in some stairwell or holding pen for 30-45mins after scanning your boarding pass and before you got on the plane. Ryanair did have the dual distinction of the cheapest flight we ever took within Europe (€5, Berlin-Krakow) and also the most expensive (€169, Berlin-Porto).
After a while I started going out of my way to try and avoid Ryanair when possible. This is partly how we came to fly on Air Berlin, Germany's 2nd biggest airline who had been full-service but were restructuring and had cut the inflight service, and prices too (but retained the massive Lindt Chocolate heart given out at the end of the flight!). British Airways also cut out inflight service, but the 3 times I flew with them they still had it - and on 2 of them they had complimentary alcoholic beverages before that too got cut! Norwegian were a low-cost carrier that acted like a full-service airline, and although there was no inflight service they did have free wifi onboard - when everyone else barely had wifi at all, let alone free! Probably the smallest plane flown in was the ERJ-145 jet from Kyiv, Ukraine to Sofia, Bulgaria - but although Sasha thought the plane was going to be bumpy because of its size, it was quite a pleasant flight. Special mention to the flight aboard the SWISS Bombardier CS300/Airbus 220 where a cat got loose from its cage and I managed to get a pat (while trying to help retrieve it!).
Suffice to say, there was plenty of choice in airlines in Europe, and a lot of the competition was pretty cutthroat - to the point there are a number of airlines on the above list which don't exist anymore. Air Berlin is the biggest, declaring bankruptcy mid-2017 and were propped up until October by the German Government until closing - with Easyjet and Eurowings getting most of the bones of the old operation. UK carrier Monarch declared bankruptcy in September 2017, with the UK Government deciding to let it collapse and charter aircraft to repatriate all the Monarch passengers instead. Germanwings and Dniproavia also have bitten the dust, and Flybe came close although has been bought out and rebranded under the Virgin banner. I guess we were lucky not to have been disrupted by companies failing, nor the industrial action Ryanair staff started doing while we were in Germany though we thought me might get caught up in that.
If I'm talking about flying, I would be remiss if I don't give a quick mention to airports. London had 6, Berlin had 2. Of the London Airports, I did them all at least once - Gatwick was by far my favourite, and Heathrow was among my least favourite along with Stansted. Heathrow is 5 average sized individual terminals, mass slow-moving immigration and security queues and expensive pricing, while Stansted - the Ryanair hub - also had slow moving counter queues and security. Luton was nice although slightly awkward to get to, Southend didn't have many flights to it and London City tended to be pricey to fly into (and a really small terminal!). Gatwick easily won me over with its two very well appointed terminals, always speedy security, and never a hold-up at immigration. Of Berlin's two, Sasha preferred West Berlin's Tegel which admittedly was nice in that it had individual security scanners and lounges for each gate in the main terminal and good facilities elsewhere - but it was tired and was being kept on life support, as it was supposed to have been closed by the long-delayed new Berlin Brandenburg Airport based opposite East Berlin's airport, Schoenefeld. On average I think we did more flights out of Schoenefeld, passing the big Brandenburg Airport terminal each time which was always lit up, but no one home. Munich Airport was the best of the German Airports we experienced, Charles de Gaulle Terminal 1 was one of the strangest (inspired by the shape of an Octopus, it looked like a spaceship), and Zurich was probably the cleanest and most posh looking of them all.
On the note of the longhaul flights - in the end I only ever flew Air Berlin, Etihad and Virgin Australia on any long haul legs. Both Air Berlin and Virgin Australia were quite pleasant, Etihad was okay but their entertainment system was slow and buggy plus they really tried to shoe-horn in the seats on the 777. I never got a chance to fly in a 747, which is becoming rare, or an A380. But there were a few flights in 777's, A330's and even a now-rare A340. Had we gone to Hawaii, I could have added a 757, 717 and a 787 to the list!
96 flights over 44 months comes out to just over 2 flights a month. Put it that way, it doesn't seem like much!