Saying Goodbye to Status Flying and Hello to Saving Big On a Budget Airline

I traveled a lot for my last job, and earned all the frequent-flyer perks. First class upgrades! Premium lounges! And plenty of “recognition” — a.k.a., half-pleasantries that would barely register on the ground but when flying make you feel special. Once, I spent several months traveling the same itinerary, week after week. Eventually the flight attendants on this route seemed to not only recognize me, but also remember my beverage and snack preferences (“black coffee” and “no, thank you” respectively).

When I left the job, my elite perks vanished and I had to begin flying like a normal person again — i.e., infrequently and uncomfortably. When my wife and I were planning a short vacation to Denmark over Christmas, we found flights in the $600-$700 range on airlines like Delta and United. But one option caught my eye — $405 on Norwegian Air Shuttle.

Norwegian is a low-cost carrier (LCC) that has grown quickly in the last few years. The New York Times recently profiled Norwegian’s attempts to break into the competitive transatlantic market as a no-frills, budget-friendly alternative to big airlines.

Norwegian Air Flies in the Face of the Trans-Atlantic Establishment

LCCs like Spirit, Ryanair and Norwegian basically offer you a deal: For an extremely low “base fare,” they’ll give you a seat and nothing else. But selling tickets isn’t how they make their real money — these airlines typically depend on “ancillary revenue,” fees charged for everything BESIDES tickets: checked bags, meals, etc. Analysts predict that airlines made nearly $60 billion in ancillary revenue last year, an increase of over 160% since 2010.

Norwegian charges extra for almost everything — the $405 fare we saw only included a ticket and a single carry-on. Even this seems lavish compared with Frontier Airlines, a domestic LCC that charges passengers who use the overhead bins. Ryanair’s CEO openly mused about charging for use of the lavatories before backing off the idea.

The airlines rationalize this system with a thinly-veiled appeal to class warfare: Why should YOU, the single-tote-bag-carrying ascetic, have to subsidize some peanut-happy oaf with two huge RollaBoards and a 17-inch laptop? Yes, this is basically the same argument Republicans use against property taxes and Obamacare. The world would indeed be a grim place if we only paid for things we personally used. But there’s no commonweal on a plane; as long as we get there safely, I can bring my own damn sandwich if it saves me some money.

Clicking through each screen on Norwegian’s pokey website, I briefly considered each “optional add-on” before checking “no”:

• Did we want to select our seats in advance? That would ensure that we could sit together, but would also set us back $50. We figured this flight would already be a test of our endurance, so the prospect of sitting in middle seats at opposite ends of the plane didn’t scare us much. “No”!
• Should we check bags for $45 in advance (or check them at the airport for $65)? We were only going for a few days and my wife is an expert packer. “No”!
• How about food? For $25 each way, we could pre-order a meal in advance, or buy food and drinks a la carte. We decided to load up on snacks and bring water bottles to fill before boarding. “No”!

A running tally on the screen kept track of our add-ons, and dutifully reported we hadn’t added-on any. Still just $405 apiece.

Then I came across A BOMBSHELL! Apparently I could save even more by buying tickets through the Norway version of the website and having the prices quoted in undervalued Norwegian kroner instead of U.S. dollars. True, the entire site would now be in Norwegian, but Google Translate could probably help. This felt like a game changer. I quickly opened a new browser window and started over in Norwegian, retracing my steps and replacing all my “no’s” with “nei’s.”

Eventually I got to the final booking page, which showed a “totalpris inkl. skatter og avgifter” of 3,311 kroner per person — the equivalent of just $381 roundtrip. We’d saved almost $50 between us for the exact same tickets.

($50 would turn out to be barely enough money for a light breakfast in Denmark, but this feels irrelevant.)

Just when I thought I was in the clear… WHAMMO. A 1.99% “service charge” for using a credit card as payment. What? This was unexpected.

At this point, a crazy person would take the time to do the math on a quick jaunt out to JFK, stopping at the bank to withdraw enough cash to pay in person at the counter. Luckily, a rough cost-benefit analysis would convince said crazy person that the $15.74 fee was probably worth it. So Norwegian won that final round — but I’ll be back.

Norwegian’s flights depart from Terminal 1 at JFK, where it operates alongside a motley crew that includes Azerbaijan Airlines, Saudi Arabian and Aeroflot, the Russian carrier that still uses a hammer-and-sickle in its logo. The check-in lines were long, but we were able to obtain two seats together after all. The waiting area seemed stuffier and less hospitable than, say, Delta’s glam setup at Terminal 4, with Shake Shack, The Palm, and multiple fancy lotion dispensaries.

But, once we boarded, it was … totally fine. A normal plane, with normal people and normal seats, settling in for the 7+ hours of public intimacy that is transatlantic flight.

Our seats, close to the last row, were comfortable and the legroom wasn’t awful. The personal touchscreens had enough new movies and TV shows to get us through the flight. Ads hawking blanket-and-pillow sets ($5) and snacks ($4–8) flashed constantly, but the ambient cabin mood lighting made it easy to tune them out out.

And true to their word, the flight attendants offered us nothing to eat or drink for the entire flight. And I don’t mean “nothing” as a euphemism for “basically nothing” or “something forgettable.” I mean literally, exactly nothing. (On the return flight, I was feeling parched and tested a recent policy change that provides customers free water if requested. It was handed over in a small paper cup, without ice or a smile.)

But ultimately, this seemed to be the only real concession to the flight’s low-budget nature of the airline. And for around half of what other airlines were charging for the same trip, it still felt like a steal.

Matt Baer lives in New York. Follow him on Twitter: @ThisIsMattBaer

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