There is no such thing as the best budget airline in the UK. There is only the best budget airline for your specific route, your bag situation, your tolerance for early starts and your willingness to walk for fifteen minutes at the destination to save eight quid on the bus. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
What follows is our honest read on the six carriers that dominate cheap flying out of British airports — Ryanair, easyJet, Wizz Air, Jet2, Vueling and Pegasus. We have flown all of them many times, paid our own fares, and queued at our own boarding gates. None of these companies have any input into what is written below.
Ryanair
Ryanair is the carrier British travellers love to complain about and continue to book in vast numbers. The headline fares are genuinely the lowest in Europe on the routes they fly, and the network from UK airports — particularly Stansted, Manchester, Edinburgh and Bristol — is unmatched. If your priority is getting from A to B for the absolute minimum cash, Ryanair will usually win the search.
The catches are well known and still real. The free cabin allowance is one small under-seat bag; anything larger costs extra, and at the gate the surcharge for a non-compliant bag can exceed the price of the flight itself. Seat selection costs, and if you do not pay you will be allocated middle seats at opposite ends of the cabin from your travelling companion. Some of their “airports” are genuinely a long way from the city — Frankfurt-Hahn, Paris-Beauvais and Stockholm-Skavsta are the famous offenders, with onward bus journeys of an hour or more.
What Ryanair does very well, and gets less credit for, is operational punctuality. On-time performance is typically better than easyJet and broadly comparable to Jet2, and the cancellation rate on UK routes has been low in recent years. The cabin crew get on with the job, the boarding process is brisk, and if you have prepared properly (one bag, no surprises, screenshot of the boarding pass) the experience is fine.
Best for: point-to-point trips where you can travel light and the headline fare is materially below the competition.
Worst for: family groups with multiple bags who have not done the maths upfront.
easyJet
easyJet sits in the middle ground between Ryanair’s hard-edged budget model and the legacy carriers. The base fares are usually £15-£30 more than Ryanair on directly comparable routes, but the cabin allowance is more generous (a larger cabin bag is included in the standard fare on most routes) and the airports are mostly the actual ones — Gatwick, Charles de Gaulle, Schiphol, Malpensa.
The network out of Gatwick and Luton is enormous, with strong secondary hubs at Bristol, Manchester, Edinburgh and Belfast. easyJet also serves more “interesting” destinations than Ryanair: more Greek islands, more Italian regional cities, more Spanish secondary airports.
Punctuality is the weak point. Summer 2022 and 2023 saw notable disruption, and even in normal seasons the on-time performance lags behind Jet2 and Ryanair. If you are connecting onwards or have a non-refundable hotel check-in, factor in a buffer.
Best for: family trips, anyone with a normal cabin bag, mainstream European destinations from London or the south coast.
Worst for: connecting itineraries that cannot absorb a delay.
Wizz Air
Wizz is the central and eastern European specialist, and from a UK perspective it owns most of the cheap-flight market to places ending in -ia and -ova. Luton is the primary UK hub, with strong secondary operations from Gatwick, Birmingham and Liverpool. If you want to get to Tirana, Skopje, Sofia, Bucharest, Cluj, Iaşi, Wrocław, Katowice, Vilnius or Riga for under £100 return, Wizz is almost always the answer. Our Balkans guide covers the routes in detail.
The pricing model is closer to Ryanair than to easyJet: tiny under-seat bag included, anything larger costs extra, seat selection costs, the website will try repeatedly to upsell you priority boarding and a “Wizz Flex” change-fee waiver that you almost certainly do not need. Customer service has historically been the weakest of the major budget carriers, and refund handling after cancellations has drawn justified criticism.
What Wizz gets right is the routes themselves. Nobody else flies many of them at all, let alone for the money. If you can absorb the operational rough edges and pack accordingly, it is the only realistic way to do central and eastern Europe on a budget from the UK.
Best for: central and eastern European destinations no other budget carrier serves.
Worst for: anyone who needs reliable customer service after something goes wrong.
Jet2
Jet2 is the budget carrier the British press is allowed to like, and unusually for that genre, the affection is broadly deserved. Based out of Leeds Bradford, Manchester, Birmingham, East Midlands, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, Stansted and Bristol, it has the most genuinely regional UK network of any low-cost airline. The standard fare includes 10kg of cabin baggage, which on Ryanair or Wizz would cost an extra £30 each way.
Routes lean heavily toward the Mediterranean and the holiday-package market: Majorca, Tenerife, Faro, Antalya, Heraklion, the Costas. If you are doing a city break to Berlin or a weekend in Krakow, Jet2 is rarely the cheapest. If you are taking the family to Lanzarote in August, it usually wins on total cost and is markedly less stressful than the alternatives.
Operational reliability is consistently the best of any UK budget carrier, customer service is reachable by phone (a low bar that competitors fail), and the package-holiday business gives them more incentive than the others to actually look after passengers when things go wrong.
Best for: family holidays to mainstream Mediterranean destinations, particularly from the north of England.
Worst for: central European city breaks and anything off the package-holiday map.
Vueling
Vueling is the Spanish budget carrier owned by IAG (the British Airways parent group). From the UK it is essentially a Spain specialist, with strong service to Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao, Valencia and the Balearics, plus useful onward connections at Barcelona to North Africa and the Canaries.
The fare structure resembles easyJet more than Ryanair, with a reasonable cabin allowance in the base price and optional extras that are not punitive. Punctuality has been improving from a historically poor base. The website and app are clunky but functional. The unique selling point is the Barcelona hub: if you are going to anywhere in Spain that is not directly served from your nearest UK airport, a Vueling itinerary via Barcelona is often the cheapest option.
Best for: Spanish destinations, particularly secondary cities and the Canaries via Barcelona.
Worst for: anywhere outside the Iberian sphere.
Pegasus
Pegasus is the Turkish low-cost carrier and an underused option from UK airports. Direct service from Stansted, Gatwick, Manchester, Edinburgh and Birmingham connects to Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen (the second Istanbul airport, on the Asian side), where the onward network covers most of Turkey, the Caucasus, central Asia and surprisingly large parts of the Middle East and East Africa.
For Turkey specifically, Pegasus is usually the cheapest way to get to anywhere east of Istanbul — Cappadocia (via Kayseri), the eastern Black Sea coast, the Antalya hinterland. For onward connections to Pristina, Beirut, Tbilisi or Tashkent, the through fares can be remarkably low if you accept a four-hour layover.
The catches: the cabin baggage limit is tighter than the European budget carriers (8kg on most fare classes), the seats have minimal pitch, and the connection at Sabiha Gökçen requires a domestic-to-international transfer that involves leaving and re-entering the secure area on some itineraries. None of this is a deal-breaker if you know it is coming.
Best for: Turkey itself and one-stop journeys to the Caucasus, central Asia or eastern Mediterranean.
Worst for: anyone unprepared for the tighter cabin allowance.
Luggage: the real cost comparison
The headline fare comparison between carriers becomes meaningless once you add the actual baggage you need. Rough indicative numbers for adding a 23kg checked bag to a return flight from the UK, based on standard booking-window prices:
- Ryanair — typically £45-£70 return depending on route and timing
- easyJet — typically £40-£60 return
- Wizz Air — typically £45-£75 return
- Jet2 — typically £40-£55 return (and 22kg is often the standard limit)
- Vueling — typically £40-£55 return
- Pegasus — typically £35-£50 return
Add it at booking, never at the airport — the desk surcharge for a bag added late can be three times the booked price. And for any flight under three hours where you are staying less than a week, cabin-only with a packable laundry detergent in your wash bag is almost always the right answer.
The honest hierarchy
If we had to rank these six on “would-we-fly-them-again-without-thinking”, the order would be: Jet2, Pegasus, easyJet, Vueling, Ryanair, Wizz. That ranking would change instantly if the question were “which is cheapest to a specific Balkan or central European city”, in which case Wizz and Ryanair shoot to the top. The right airline is the one with the right route at the right time for the right total cost. Our guide to finding cheap fares covers the search side of that equation.