Some people argue that cheap flights are a good trend as people are able to travel in an affordable manner around the world, while others believe that this trend has its downsides. While heavily discounted flights provide people with low incomes the opportunity to travel to foreign countries or to visit family members, I believe that this is a totally negative trend as the price of the bargain tickets are paid by the underpaid employees and the environment.
On the one hand, cheap flight tickets enable households that earn little money a way to travel or to visit family and friends in other countries. As taking a flight is still the best and mostly the only mean to travel long distances, people who are not able to afford an usual flight ticket price would not be able to visit family members or friends outside of their own country. For instance, some parts of my family live in Sweden. Back in 2015, I was studying and had no own income. Even though, I wanted to visit my family in Sweden. A low-cost airline offered flights for 25€ to that time and so I was able to see my family, albeit I had only little money available
On the other hand, low-cost airlines pay small salaries to their employees and do not care about the environment, so that they are able to over incredibly cheap tickets. The employees of airlines, that offer highly discounted flight tickets, have to work often under bad working conditions and for low salaries. In addition, the high volume of flights provided by the airlines lead to heavy CO2 emissions that damage the environment. For instance, the employees of Ryanair are only paid the minimum wage and since today, they are not allowed to have their own worker’s council
In conclusion, although cheap flights are often the only way for people with low incomes to travel or to visit their family, I believe that the bargain flights come with a lot of unseen costs for the employees of the airlines and our environment.