How are low-cost airlines tickets rewarded?

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.

Aviasales is a metasearch engine designed to help users find the cheapest tickets, so low-cost airlines are included in the search results even if there’s no profit from selling them. However, at a partner's request, we can disable specific ticket agencies and airlines for their partner ID.

List of low-cost Airlines that don’t pay rewards

The list below shows low-cost carriers with which Travelpayouts has no cooperation agreements. They do not share booking data with us and do not pay us any rewards for tickets found and bought through our search (current as of 04/29/2024).

  • Wizzair
  • Indigo
  • Jetstar
  • EasyJet

Low-cost airlines that pay rewards

Pegasus and AirFrance know how to work with partner IDs and send us statistics. It is important to keep the following in mind:

  • All bookings (domestic and international flights) will be displayed in the statistics.
  • Rewards are only paid for international flights.
  • Both airlines send statistics once a month (in the first week of the new month for the previous month).

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.