The only thing I don't like about the ultra-low-cost carriers is that, much like everything else in life, the edges squeeze out the middle. Having dirt cheap fares with a lot of add-ons and annoyances (most of the flight being an ad, for instance) on the one side and high-cost, luxury flying on the other seems to remove the I-don't-want-to-be-hassled-but-also-not-fly-in-the-front fares.
Actually the standard US airline flying experience is already not much better (if at all) than the European budget one in terms of nickel and diming, it just costs more.
This amazed me as someone coming from Europe last year to the US — even on carriers like United and US Airways you get only about as much as you do on European low-cost airlines like EasyJet and RyanAir.
I flew to Oslo earlier this week from Glasgow (via London Heathrow), on British Airways. I got:
* Hold luggage.
* A sandwich on the ~2h flight from LHR–OSL (and a biscuit on the ~1:30 flight from GLA–LHR).
* Tea and a soft drink on both flights.
This is the sort of level of service I'm used to being included in the ticket price on relatively short flights — to find no major American carrier does this amazed me. It's also worthwhile noting that compared with low cost airlines like EasyJet and Norwegian, British Airways is typically around the same price in my experience once you add-on the above to the base fare of the others. (RyanAir is cheaper, but does so by strong-arming minor airports into charging them next to nothing, which results in them flying to relatively distant airports.)
British Airways does offer quite a competitive service. Now that Willie Walsh has stopped IAG bleeding cash from the acquisition of Iberia (an airline desperately in debt) they're turning a healthy profit for an airline - a complete parallel universe to what is happening at AA.
