Budget Airlines to Europe: The Cheapest Carrier Isn't One

There is an obvious way to write this page: list the budget airlines, quote their headline fares, warn about bag fees. Our own data says something more interesting, and slightly uncomfortable for the genre.

The cheap end of the market is all full-service carriers

Rank	Carrier	Median premium	What it is
1st	Icelandair	$0	Full service, hub at Keflavik — 150 routes priced
2nd	Royal Air Maroc	$0	Full service, hub at Casablanca — 38 routes
6th	SAS	$12	Full service, hub at Copenhagen — 170 routes
8th	TAP Air Portugal	$20	Full service, hub at Lisbon — 131 routes

31 carriers have enough routes in our grid to be ranked on price. Not one of them is a budget airline, and the four above are all doing the same thing: selling connecting traffic through a hub, where the alternative to a cheap seat is an empty one.

Two more carriers reach a $0 median — Discover Airlines on 11 priced routes and Edelweiss Air on 4 — and they are left out of the table on purpose. A zero across four city pairs is a fact about those city pairs; Icelandair's zero across 150 is a fact about the airline, and a ranking that does not say which is which is not worth printing. An earlier version of this table had TAP Air Portugal first at $0 and SAS fourth at $20. Both were true of a twelve-gateway grid and neither survived the full one: TAP sells five of the 26 gateways, so its zero was always a fact about those five cities.

The full grid made that point far harder than a smaller one could. Across all 888 routes we price, the cheapest carrier was a connecting one on 858 of them — 96%. Not a budget nonstop: a full-service airline routing you through Lisbon, Keflavik, Casablanca or Copenhagen on two flights it was operating anyway.

That is the finding our best airlines analysis reached from the product side and our Reykjavik piece reached from the routing side. Cheap transatlantic flying is a hub business, not a no-frills one.

But the budget carrier we can price is the cheapest thing in the dataset

Here is where the obvious version of this article goes wrong.

Norse Atlantic was the cheapest carrier on both routes we priced it on.

Route	Norse Atlantic	Next cheapest	Norse advantage
JFK → Rome	$461 nonstop	TAP Air Portugal $625 via Lisbon	$164
Orlando → Gatwick	$754 nonstop	British Airways $1,164 nonstop	$410

A $0 median premium, cheapest on 2 of 2. If Norse flew one more route in our grid it would rank level with Icelandair and Royal Air Maroc at the top — and, like Discover and Edelweiss, on too little coverage for that to be a fact about the airline.

Both of those wins are nonstops, which is rarer in our data than it sounds: a nonstop is the cheapest fare on only 30 of the 888 routes we price, and Norse holds 2 of them from the 2 routes it flies. Everywhere else, the thing undercutting the flag carrier is another flag carrier.

It does not appear in the table at the top of this page for a single reason: our ranking requires three routes before it will place a carrier, and Norse has two. That is a coverage threshold, not a verdict on price — and stating it as "no budget airline ranks" without that sentence would be the kind of true-but-misleading claim this site exists to avoid.

Separately, in our arrival-airport pricing — a different dataset, six-month window rather than fixed week — Norse held the cheapest way into London from New York at $526 nonstop to Gatwick, against $779 for Heathrow. Two datasets, two methods, same conclusion about the same airline.

So the problem is not price. It is existence.

Carrier	What changed	When
PLAY	Ceased operations entirely	29 September 2025
LEVEL	Dropped Barcelona–San Francisco	30 April 2026
LEVEL	Suspended Barcelona–Boston	25 October 2026
LEVEL	Suspended Barcelona–Los Angeles	25 October 2026
Condor	Two connecting economy routes priced in November, no nonstop	seasonal

PLAY was the successor to WOW Air, which failed in 2019. It shut down four years after launching, and until we checked this week it was still listed on this site as a current operator at six US airports — a mistake worth admitting, because it is exactly the failure mode this category produces.

LEVEL is not in trouble and its routes still went away. It continues to fly Barcelona to New York at six weekly. It has simply stopped flying to Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco inside twelve months. The Boston route is the one in our own photograph of a LEVEL A330, which is how quickly this moves.

Condor sells almost nothing in the week we price: 2 economy routes of the 888 in the grid, both of them connections rather than its own nonstops. Until the third collection sweep it priced on none at all, and this page said so. Its US flying is seasonal — a legitimate business model that also means it cannot be relied on for a winter trip — and two connecting routes is below the three-route minimum our ranking needs, so it is in the carrier list and out of the ranking, which is the honest way to record an airline that exists and is barely selling.

What the fixed week cannot see, and why that matters here

One methodological point, because it changes how to read all of the above.

Our carrier grid holds the dates fixed so that the difference between two rows is the airline rather than the week. That comparability has a cost: a departure on one named day only returns carriers that fly that day, and every low-cost transatlantic operator flies less than daily.

When we tried to price this category properly, LEVEL turned out to operate New York to Barcelona but not on the Sunday we price — adjacent departures quote from $522. Norse sold nothing on New York to Gatwick that week, despite our own six-month sweep finding that exact pair at $526, while its Orlando–Gatwick and New York–Rome flights did operate and did price. Same airline, same week, in the data on two routes and invisible on a third.

Which means the two Norse rows above understate the category rather than flattering it. A dataset built to compare carriers fairly is structurally poor at seeing carriers that fly three times a week.

The threshold that hides Norse is not wrong, and it is not free either

Our ranking needs three routes before it will place a carrier. That rule exists because a carrier priced on one route can look like a world-beater on a single lucky fare, and a ranking built from those is worthless — it is the same reason every ranking on this site uses the median rather than the minimum.

It is also the reason the cheapest airline we have measured does not appear in our own table of cheapest airlines.

Both of those are true at once, and the honest response is to say so rather than quietly pick whichever framing is tidier. A three-route minimum is right for the ranking and wrong for Norse specifically, and a reader is better served knowing the rule and the exception than being handed either one alone.

The practical consequence is narrow: treat the top table as the reliable cheap end, and treat Norse as a genuinely cheaper option wherever it happens to fly. Those are different kinds of claim, resting on different amounts of evidence, and they should not be flattened into one list.

The two we cannot price at all

French Bee and LEVEL are both in our airline roster, flagged low-cost, with zero fares in the grid. Nothing here scores them, because there is nothing to score.

That is not evidence they are expensive. It is a statement about coverage: our carrier grid prices all 26 US gateways into 47 European airports, and neither airline flies a pair in that set on the day we price. French Bee operates to Paris Orly rather than Charles de Gaulle, which is the airport our grid tracks — a one-airport difference that removes an entire carrier from view.

Pricing them properly needs a dataset built on flexible dates rather than a fixed week. Until that exists, this page says what it knows and leaves the rest blank, which is the same rule that keeps unconfirmed cabins out of our reviews.

What to actually do

1. Do not search for a budget airline. Search the route. Our grid's cheap end is occupied by Icelandair, SAS and TAP — full-service, connecting, and flying daily.
2. When Norse serves your city pair, price it first. It was cheapest on every route we could measure, by $164 to $410.
3. Check the route still exists before planning around it. Three of the five carriers here have cut or suspended US flying inside a year, and one no longer exists.
4. Read the fare as the whole trip. A low-cost transatlantic ticket typically excludes a checked bag and seat selection; a $75 bag each way turns a $461 fare into $611 and closes most of the gap to a full-service carrier that included it.
5. Do not book a budget carrier for a tight connection. A three-times-weekly route means the recovery flight after a disruption may be two days away.

Method

Fares come from two of our own datasets, kept separate because their methods differ. The carrier grid prices every airline for the same fixed travel week of November 8–14, 2026, so a difference between rows is the airline. The arrival-airport data prices the cheapest one-week round trip in a six-month window, which is where the $526 Gatwick figure comes from. We do not mix them in a single comparison.

Route withdrawals and the PLAY shutdown are not first-party: they come from carrier announcements and schedule reporting, each recorded in our data with its source and date, the same rule our new-routes coverage follows.

Where to go from here

• The best airlines to Europe — the 31 carriers scored on product as well as price.
• Connecting through Reykjavik — the cheapest carrier in our data, priced route by route.
• Which airport to fly into — where the $526 Gatwick figure comes from, and why the arrival airport is worth pricing separately.
• SAS business class — 170 routes at a $12 median premium, reviewed.