Original question by @HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
I don’t fly that often, and when I do, I pick the cheapest airline possible. Maybe I’m just lucky but I’ve personally never had budget airlines screw me over all that much. The delays and getting upcharged for everything is expected, but I’ve never actually been in a situation where a flight got cancelled and they just left me to sleep in the terminal overnight or anything like that, so I never really considered paying more for one of the “normal” airlines.
I’m curious as to what economy is like on a non-budget airline. They can be over double the cost of a budget airline ticket so do you actually get double the service? Anyone who has a lot of experience flying both want to weigh in on how they compare?
Around 10 years ago I switched to a specific big airline and started building frequent flyer status. Before that I was willing to do the regular budget airlines (Southwest, Frontier, JetBlue) for $100 savings or the ultra budget airlines (Spirit, Allegiant) for another $100 savings over that.
But I’ve had bad experiences with Frontier (canceled flight, next available flight not available for 3 days) and Spirit (more time on the tarmac than in the air). Both resulted in missed events (and for the Frontier flight I needed to just buy a last minute ticket, out of pocket, with another airline).
So now, when it’s important for me to be on time, I tend to prefer airlines that have multiple flights per day between my origin and destination, and have some redundancy and resilience against the unexpected. There are still network effects that provide some major value, to where I’m generally willing to pay $200 more for flights on my preferred airline.