Chris Christensen also emailed us with your suggestion to call the airline in advance. It’s our experience that budget airlines don’t make it easy for you to do that. In fact, it can become ridiculous at times: changing your ticket can cost more than the original price.

Easyjet are probably the friendliest of the budget airlines, but there’s still a big step between them and a club lounge.

Another suggestion is to call the airline _before_ you miss your flight and attempt to re-book. Many low-cost tickets are worthless if you don’t cancel prior to flight departure. If you know you’re going to miss your flight (e.g., sitting in a massive traffic back-up or in a strike-bound train), use your mobile to ring up the airlines. This gives the airline a chance to re-sell your seat, which can make them much more accommodating with regards to re-booking. This may not work with European budget airlines. My experiences with EasyJet hasn’t found them to be the most flexible or customer service-oriented airline. Unlike Southwest in the US, I’ve found that EasyJet treats their passengers more like transactions to be squeezed for maximum revenue than customers with whom a relationship should be built.

It also goes without saying that airline frequent flier status is very important here. A United Airlines Global Services or 1K flier will get a lot more service than a one-time passenger. Status fliers have their customer service numbers to call where they can reach highly trained non-outsourced non-offshore agents who know how to work the system and are empowered to do so. Again, this doesn’t apply when flying EasyJet and their ilk, but a key reason to concentrate your flying on a few airlines.