Low cost airlines

Flight scanners and ticket sites: airport names often misleading

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Do you often use a flight scanner or airline website to book cheap flight tickets online? Pay close attention to the exact airport names!

Flight scanners and airlines websites: beware of low-cost carriers

You may have experienced the following before: you thought you were flying to Frankfurt, but after arriving at the airport, it turned out you had to travel another 126 kilometres to reach the city centre. We found quite a few examples like this one across Europe, especially with low-cost carriers such as Ryanair. Flight scanners and cheaper airlines rely on passengers being so impressed by the low prices, that they pay less attention to detail. One of these details may very well be that you will be forced to spend another 100 pounds to get to the city you thought you would be arriving at in the first place. Remote airports are often cheaper for airlines to operate on, so enabling low prices for tickets may require them to use these kinds of smaller airports.

Paris Vatry Disney tops them all: from this airport, a two-hour journey (159 kilometres) is necessary to see the Eiffel tower. Since 'Paris' appears in the airport name in the flight scanner, you expect to be very close to the city, but unfortunately this isn't the case. So watch out when booking a flight!

It could be useful to find out what the financial consequences are of something like this happening. If you need to arrange transport, a shuttle or taxi, travelling another 159 kilometres could cost you dearly. In this case, buying a ticket with a flight scanner or low-cost airline website in the assumption that you got a great deal may prove quite disappointing if you take all of the incidental costs into account.

Top 10 airports to watch out for, especially when booking though a flight scanner or low-cost airline website:

Airports: Distance to city center:

1. Paris (Paris Vatry (Disney)) 159 kilometers

2. Frankfurt (Hahn) 126 kilometers

3. Oslo (Torp) 118 kilometers

4. Munich West (Memmingen) 117 kilometers

5. Barcelona (Reus) 107 kilometers

6. Stockholm (Skavsta) 106 kilometers

7. Stockholm (Västeras) 104 kilometers

8. London (Oxford) 97 kilometers

9. Barcelona (Girona) 91 kilometers

10. Paris (Beauvais) 88 kilometers

Source: Columbus magazine