This post explains what low-cost airlines are and how they can influence partners’ income.
This article describes what low-cost airlines are and how they affect partners’ earnings in the flight programs represented on the Travelpayouts platform.
What Are Low-Cost Airlines?
Low-cost airlines are carriers that offer low fares to passengers by cutting down on many of the services included in the ticket price. That means that additional fees can be charged for things such as:
- In-flight meals
- Checked baggage
- Seat selection
- Offline check-in
In addition, low-cost airlines usually don't offer convenient departure times and tickets are non-refundable. This allows them to offer the lowest prices on tickets, and while this may be advantageous for travelers, it's not necessarily beneficial for those who sell the tickets.
The fact is low-cost airlines generally don't pay a fee to agents for selling tickets (which helps them save money). As a result, we aren't able to pay out profits to partners from low-cost airline ticket sales.
We aren't a ticket agency, we're a metasearch engine. That means it's important to us that our users are able to find the cheapest tickets, so we intentionally include low-cost airlines in our search results while not profiting from them. However, at a partner's request, we can disable specific ticket agencies and airlines for their partner ID.
List of Low-Cost Airlines
The following airlines and agencies (available on the English version of the site) don't pay remuneration or transfer sales statistics to us (relevant as of September 3, 2021):
- Air Asia
- Air Canada
- Armenia
- Bees Airline
- Byojet.com.au
- Cheapoair.com
- China Travel Depot
- CityJet
- Cleartrip
- Easy Jet
- Edreams.com
- Ethiopian Airlines
- Flightschannel
- Flightsmojo
- Flymotorsich
- Globehunters
- Gotogate
- Gotogate
- Indigo
- Jeju Air
- Jetstar
- Justfly.com/Flightub
- Moy Reis
- Ryanair
- Seat24
- T'way Air
- Tajik Air
- Travelmakers.us
- Travelstart
- Vietjet
- WizzAir
How to Make Money On Low-Cost Airlines
In order to receive remuneration from low-cost airlines, tickets need to be bought from agencies that set their own surcharge (you can find them in a dropdown list by clicking on the agency's name on each ticket – if there are no agencies in the list, that probably means that the low-cost airline doesn't work with agencies represented on our website).
Please note that when buying tickets from agents, prices will be a bit higher than when buying from airlines, so keep that in mind if you're considering promoting low-cost tickets.