The Phenomena of the Low Cost Budget Airline has certainly come of age in the last couple of decades and unless you happen to have been on the moon for the past 10 to 15 years you will have been aware of the rapid increase in the number of these travel operators.

Nowadays some air line brand names such as Easy Jet and Ryannair sit alongside the major brands such as British Airways and Air France.

The trouble in the past was that the majority of the low cost carriers only serviced the smaller domestic markets of Europe. Now they appear to be almost everywhere and the distinction between Travel Company and Airline has become distinctly blurred in recent years.

But alongside the likes of Southwest Airlines in the United States, other low cost airlines have begun to appear on a regional basis worldwide.

However it is in Europe that the Low Cost Budget Airline reigns supreme.

At the last count and when we carried out a quick survey recently we found that there were approximately fifty such airline operations throughout Europe flying to an ever increasing and varied range of destinations.

In Europe the main Low Cost Carriers an certainly the best known are Easy Jet and Ryannair. Easy Jet claim to be the most "webbed" airline in the world and no this doesn't refer to strange aspects of the staffs feet (I am sure they are not webbed honestly) but rather that due to the fact that every Easy Jet plane has a massive web address "easyjet.com" plastered along its fuselage just in case you were one of the unfortunate ones and forgot their web address - as if? Apparently nearly 90% of its bookings come via their web site and this brings about it massive reduction in costs of scale.

The main routes that Easy Jet covers are from their main hubs at London Luton and Gatwick airports. Now here is an interesting if not slightly "anorakish" fact and that despite the size of the Airport, the amount of Traffic it handles, Easy Jet is, apparently the second largest Airline and London Gatwick Airport!

Easy Jet has hubs at Gatwick, Luton, Stansted, Nottingham East Midlands, Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol, Belfast, Berlin Schonefeld, Dortmund, Geneva and Paris Orly.

In Ryannairs case as well as now being quite dominant within their own Hub at Dublin, Ryannair now have hubs based at London Stansted and London Luton, Liverpool John Lennon Airport, Nottingham East Midlands, Prestwick in SCOTLAND, Shannon in the Irish Republic, Brussels, Frankfurt Hahn, Stockholm, Bergamo (nr Milan) Rome and Girona (nr Barcelona).

It would appear that gone are the days when it was nothing more than a cross between a massive rugby scrum and a slightly contained riot trying to get onto a flight with one of the Low Cost Carriers.

Situations have improved and gone are the days (hopefully) when the likes of Ryannair would just hurl you out of the plane and then in an attempt to make up time, hurtle down the runway in search of the next airport......and forget to unload the existing material and content from the cold hold! This last part is based on a true story; a Ryannair aircraft did once hurtle out of an airport in an attempt to make up time etc only to discover that they had forgotten about the property and belongings for their recently disembarked passengers left in the hold!

Still as we have said, things are definitely improving (or so we hope) so perhaps we will no longer be hearing these sorts of stories any more.

Hope so!