Air travel in Old Europe meant monopoly carriers ferrying businessmen between financial or political capitals: London–Frankfurt, Paris–Rome, Brussels–Vienna. Everyone else took the train or stayed home. In the New Europe, low-cost airlines offer anyone with a few euros to spare connections that reflect as much about the conti­nent’s changing demography as they do its geography: Katowice–Doncaster; Eindhoven–Istanbul; Dublin–Faro.

Or even Warsaw–Liverpool, the route I’ve just taken on something called W!ZZAir, one of several new discount air­lines offering one-way fares for practically nothing—and, in some cases, actually nothing. My fellow passengers are mostly young, mostly Polish, and on their way back home after visiting family.

W!ZZAir is perhaps the most colorfully named of the new crop of upstart carriers, which includes Sky Europe, Air Berlin, Condor, EasyJet, SmartWings, and Blue Air. Like their American counterparts, they are changing the way people fly and forcing the ossified likes of Alitalia and Aer Lingus to get with the cheap program.

The most successful is Dublin-based Ryanair, which has imitated the no-frills, high-profit busi­ness model pioneered by Southwest Airlines in America and now flies more passengers than any other European carrier. Despite rising fuel costs, Ryanair stock, which trades on the NASDAQ in the United States, has doubled in less than two years.

W!ZZAir, with hubs in Poland and Hungary, aims to be Eastern Europe’s Ryanair. In the two years since it was founded, it has already flown more than four million passengers. It operates nine spanking new magenta-and-pink Airbus A320s on 60 routes to more than 40 destinations.

W!ZZAir is cheap. My fare from Brussels to Warsaw, 720 miles as the crow flies (the equivalent of a flight between New York and Chicago), was €29. Taxes and fees raised it to €54 (about $68 at the current exchange rate). For a one-way European ticket, that’s a bit on the high side. Ryanair has been known to offer seats for free, or close to it. “29p to Spain!” its ads scream. Even with taxes and fees, it’s possible to go from London to, say, Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain for around £15 each way (about $28)—not quite free but still manageable on even the most penurious of pilgrimage budgets.

Certain, ahem, trade-offs are part of this bargain, on top of the indignities of air travel we all endure in a post-9/11 world: long queues, strip-searches, liquid deprivation. Forget luxury and conve­nience, even when it comes to destinations. Fly with discount airlines and the airports from which you depart and at which you arrive are likely to be little more than Quonset huts with three check-in desks and a snack bar.

Moreover, these airports are usually at a great distance from the cities they purport to serve—necessitating long bus or taxi connections at both ends of a cheap flight. Thought you were flying to Brussels? Actually, you have landed in Charleroi, a down-at-the-heels mining town more than 35 miles away. Its airport calls itself “Brussels South”—as does Ryanair, its biggest customer. They should call it “Brussels Very South.” Frankfurt–Hahn airport—used by Ryanair and five other discount carriers for flights to destina­tions all over Europe—is a former NATO airbase located 85 miles from down­town Frankfurt.

More suffering awaits at check-in and departure. Draconian baggage limits put a pre­mium on packing light, if at all. Open-seating poli­cies reward pushing and shoving during the boarding process—which happens, after a long wait, in the blink of an eye. A plane arrives at the gate and passengers disem­bark from front and rear exits in a matter of min­utes. Little or no time is wasted cleaning up the plane (Ryanair has done away with seatback pouches and thus the temptation to leave any trash; W!ZZAir instructs passengers to clean up after themselves), and departing passengers board immediately.

Despite the hassles, the discount airlines are booming.

The plane is soon off again, sometimes within 20 minutes of arriving. Insisting on these no-non­sense boarding protocols at obscure airports gives most discount carriers good on-time records. Ryanair claims the best in Europe, but of the eight trips I’ve taken with Ryanair, there has been a sig­nificant delay on all but one. On one flight home to Brussels we were diverted to Liège, a town slightly less dire but significantly more distant from Brus­sels than Charleroi.

It’s not hard to see how these airlines save money. Ryanair may not have charged you much for a ticket, but once you’re on board it’s going to do its damnedest to empty your wallet. It is a kind of flying shop­ping mall. Naturally, food and drinks are on a pay-as-you-go basis. But there are also incentives to buy lots of other things, such as perfume, chocolates, even raffle tickets.

More money-spinners are on the way. Ryanair is considering in-flight gambling. It is also about to let passengers use their mobile phones for calling, text-messaging, and email. The airline promises to charge fees in line with international roaming rates. “If you want a quiet flight, use another airline,” Ryanair’s CEO, the refreshingly blunt Michael O’Leary, recently told The Financial Times. “Ryanair is noisy, full, and we are always try­ing to sell you something.”

The other discount carri­ers use similar methods to make more money per pas­senger. Of course, market economics being what they are, it was only a matter of time before airplane refresh­ments came full-circle: SmartWings, a low-cost car­rier based in Prague, is now offering a free snack and one “cold, non-alcoholic drink”—included in the ticket price!

Despite the hassles, the discount airlines are booming. Even the extra secu­rity burdens imposed on travelers last summer after British authorities uncovered a plot to blow up planes flying out of London have not hurt business. Many of the discount carriers actually reported increased passenger traffic in August. Ryanair’s business that month was 23 percent higher than the same period the previous year—even though it had canceled dozens of flights when the plot was revealed.

UK-based EasyJet, another pioneer in European discount travel, has begun wooing business travelers. It’s taking on the likes of British Airways and Lufthansa in a more upscale segment of the market by promoting its frequent daily routes from London to Milan, Geneva, Madrid, and Prague. EasyJet’s shares have done even better than Ryanair’s, tri­pling in two years on the London Stock Exchange.

Political and economic integration has made it easier to go to another country; often, you need not show a passport at your destination or even change cur­rency.

But the discount airline industry faces occasional turbulence. Government regulators sometimes seem as if they’re working to thwart the low-cost revolution. First there were EU investigations of subsidies given to some carriers by eager airport operators and regional authorities looking to boost tourism. Now the EU is worried about the impact of cheap flights on the environment. Climate-change activists say short-haul aircraft are among the worst emitters of greenhouse gases (more take­offs and landings, shorter cruising time). In July, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for airlines to be brought into the EU’s emissions trad­ing scheme and demanding increased taxes on jet fuel and fares. That would be a real threat to the £19 round-trip ticket.

Fortunately, cheap fares aren’t the only rea­son that air travel is booming in Europe. Political and economic integration has made it easier to go to another country; often, you need not show a passport at your destination or even change cur­rency. The EU, founded in the aftermath of World War II, is changing the way Europeans from dif­ferent countries view each other. I take it as a sign of how much times have changed that bill­boards in Warsaw can advertise a company called GermanWings.

Plus, Europe’s single market has made it easier for people to move abroad to find work—hence the huge number of cheap flights between Poland, with its high unemployment rate, and Britain, where low-cost labor is in demand. A half mil­lion Poles have emigrated to Britain since May 2004, when Poland joined the EU. With EasyJet or W!ZZAir they can afford trips home.

And then there is the British real estate diaspora. With housing prices at home rising astronomi­cally, Brits have taken to buying abroad, especially in France and Spain but increasingly in Eastern Europe, where vacation property is still cheap—quaint houses in villages on the Black Sea can be had for €10,000; a seven-bedroom villa overlooking the beach might run you €150,000. Transporting these weekend wanderers means big business for the discount airlines. W!ZZAir’s inflight magazine contains almost nothing but articles about—and ads for—Bulgarian beachfront real estate.

This increasing European cross-pollination is as evident in each of the three cities I visited on a recent discount-airline odyssey as it is on the flights themselves—from Warsaw to Liverpool, young émigrés; from Liverpool to Malaga, vacationing pensioners.

The bars of Warsaw, like those of most Eastern European cities, teem with packs of British men on stag-party weekends. The first words I hear in Liverpool—min­utes after I arrive at my downtown hotel—are spoken not in a Ringoesque Scouse accent but in Polish. Late the next evening, in a dark tapas bar on a Malaga side street, an elderly man sitting a few stools down from me wants to chat. Out of his mouth comes the thickest Scottish brogue I’ve ever heard. Like me, he’s just arrived from Britain, on EasyJet; I’d come from Liverpool and he from Glasgow.

I ask him about the flight. “No assigned seats,” he says to me. “I dinna like that. Havin’ to run for a seat.”

But, he adds, “I only paid a hundred and nine pounds for the ticket, so I can’t complain.”

“A hundred pounds?” I exclaim. “Seems high to me.”