How do low-cost airlines influence how people and money travel?

The International Herald Tribune writes about how European low-cost airlines "are drawing a new map of how people and money travel in Europe". An example:

Andrzej Majewski, a Pole who works as a thoracic surgeon in Britain, catches a ride to the airport in Wroclaw on Sundays and hops a Ryanair flight to his hospital in Nottingham, England. Most Fridays he commutes home to southwest Poland. The flights cost him about $50 each way. "It takes about three hours, and I'm eating lunch at my house," Majewski said.

"The low-cost airlines really facilitate a type of hypermobility for the public at large to do anything from leisure to business, to new careers", Steven Vertovec, a professor of transnational anthropology at Oxford University comments.

But not everyone is happy with Europeans' mobility. People in countries served by budget airlines complain that British bachelor and bachelorette parties are taking over Eastern European cities like Riga.

"I know about guys who go to Prague for a weekend of cheap beer, prostitutes and fighting. "People there really complain about it — and that's due to low-cost airline", Vertovec says.

>> read the whole story in the IHT (link updated)

The article is good PR for RyanAir as it is not mentioned that somebody has to pay for the low prices

Vertovec is director of the Oxford Center on Migration Policy and Society. The center has published lots of working papers online. I've written about one of them before “No Pizza without Migrants”: Between the Politics of Identity and Transnationalism by Susanne Wessendorf.