Ryanair is the airline that most consistently flies to alternative, or secondary, airports, such as Stockholm Skavsta Airport. It has worked out to be a brilliant way to reduce landing fees and other associated costs, and with that the cost of tickets.

Other airlines using this scheme include the Polish budget airline Wizz Air. Still however, many budget airlines, such as easyJet, fly to major airports.

It is often said budget airlines mislead you when they state their destinations. Ryanair has made this a habit. They say they fly to Stockholm, but actually fly to Stockholm Skavsta (Nykoping is the closest city) or Stockholm Vasteras (near Vasteras, 107 km from Stockholm), say Hamburg but fly to Lubeck, say Milan, but fly to Bergamo, etc.

True, it is false advertizing, but it is not all bad for the consumer.

For the leisure traveller, Paris Beauvais can be a much better stepping off point than Orly or Charles de Gaulle. It is for instance a better, faster, and more convenient starting point if you have a rental car. That's also true for Frankfurt Hahn and Milano Bergamo. And Lubeck can be a much more interesting destination than Hamburg.

It is somewhat of a myth that the alternative airports are further from the cities they serve. Some of them are actually closer. But they are almost without exception smaller airports. This translates to shorter lines, speedier check-in, fewer difficulties in finding your way around, and less risk of delays.

The advantages often outweigh the disadvantages.

To help you avoid unpleasant surprises, we provide you with important information about all these airports in our airport section.

New Wizz Air routes to Malmo

This December the Polish low fare airline Wizz Air will open three new routes to Malmö/Sturup. They go from Kaunas (Lithuania), Sofia (Bulgaria) och Warsaw. Wizz Air operates modern A-320s and also operates routes to Stockholm/Skavsta. Remember that you can usually find extra cheap tickets on new routes.

New low fare route to Stockholm from Hamburg

Germanwings starts a new low fare route four times weekly Stockholm/Arlanda-Hamburg. Extra cheap tickets can be book starting November 27. Germanwings operates modern A-320s and this is Germanwings third route serving Arlanda..

Arlanda new destination from Stuttgart

Hapag Lloyd Express will start operating Arlanda- Stuttgart four times weekly. Bokningsbar nu från 198 SEK inklusive skatter och avgifter. At the same time Arlanda-Hannover adds a new Monday schedule, making four the total number of flights weekly.

Flynordic add more German routes on Sundays

flynordic adds new Sunday routes Arlanda - Berlin and Arlanda - Munich.

One of the advantages of the one way tickets the budget airlines sell is that you can always use a different airline for your return trip. This can often result in big savings. But few people have started to use this trick.

Let us illustrate how this can work.

We wanted to book at trip from Stockholm to Istanbul in August, just before school starts here in Sweden. A complication is that Turkey is not yet an EU country, and therefore does not have a lot of budget airlines.

We found a good ticket to Turkey with Snowflake, the SAS brand name for low fare tickets. But the return proved to be a tougher nut to crack. Probably because many Turkish immigrants living in Sweden are returning from their summer vacations in Turkey.

So we had to find another route.

Air Baltic, also in the SAS Business Group, turns out to have a low fare route between Istanbul and Riga. But the connection from Riga to Stockholm was a bit pricey, even though in that scenario they would handle the luggage all the way to Stockholm.

But within three hours of the Riga arrival there is a Ryanair flight available to Stockholm Skavsta Airport, at a very good price.

In the end, the cost of the return trip was less than half of what we would have paid with Snowflake. And my son returned from his vacation without any problems.

So use the advantages of one way tickets. Fly a different way home.