Easy Jet

It’s been an interesting experience flying EasyJet, which offers insanely low cast fares throughout Europe. Think of it as Europe’s equivalent of Southwest Airlines. For example, we booked one way fares from Barcelona to Amsterdam for about 44 euros (about $60) and a similarly low far between Amsterdam and Berlin. When I first saw these fares, I wondered how they can possibly manage to make any money doing this, but as we’ve flown them, I’m beginning to see how they recover some of their costs. First of all, they have a VERY strict carry on policy and the size you can bring on the plane is somewhat smaller than what we’ve experienced with U.S. airlines. So, we ended up checking our two rolling backpacks and just carrying on the smaller ones. Come to find out, there’s a charge for each checked bag and the cheapest way to do that is to pay online when you book the flight. In our case, that was 22 euros per bag, which would have cost twice that much if we had checked the bags at the airport.

The next interesting thing about EasyJet is that when get to the departure area, they don’t list ahead of time what gate your flight is leaving from. Your boarding pass tells you at what time you can start boarding, but they don’t announce which gate you’re leaving from until the plane has landed. I guess that saves them money and time by not having to assign gates ahead of time? Anyway, once you get on board, there is NOTHING for free, not even peanuts or water. You are very nicely told there is a charge for everything. If that’s not enough, they come down the aisle with a duty free cart right after that announcing all the other goods you can buy while on the plane - it’s like an ongoing sales pitch! Too much…….but I’m not complaining, since it’s still probably the most economical way to fly around Europe. I think the final cost for both of us to fly from Barcelona to Amsterdam and then to Berlin, including the checked bags was about $250.

On a side note, security measures are also a little different when you fly through European airports. Going through the Amsterdam airport, we did not have to take off our shoes (I also recall this was the case in Australian airports as well - must be an American thing because of the shoe bomber guy) but we did go through the full body scan which was interesting. Anyway…….

We’re planning on taking the train between Berlin and Prague so we’ll keep you posted on how that goes.