Travel fares · Low-cost carrier fares
Low-cost carrier fare monitoring
Low-cost carriers sell most of their seats on their own website and app, price every leg on its own, and charge separately for almost everything else. Monitoring them means reading each carrier's public booking flow per market and capturing the fee structure alongside the fare.
Pay per GB · No subscription · Prices in EUR, excl. VAT
- €2.00
- per GB on ARC Fast, excl. VAT
- −44%
- at 1 TB (€1.12 / GB)
- 185+
- countries, city targeting
- Never
- expires — no subscription
Written for
- Flight aggregators adding low-cost content
- Travel startups building route search
- Airport route-development analysts
- Airline network and pricing analysts
The short answer
- Low-cost carriers flew 32.5% of European flights in January–September 2022, according to EUROCONTROL. Their fares are a third of the market, not a niche.
- Some keep their lowest fares on direct channels. In August 2025, Wizz Air said its lowest fares and full ancillary range stay on its own website and app as it added an aggregator.
- Low-cost carriers price per leg, per seat bucket and per party size. Collect one-way legs at the party size your users search, not round trips at a single default.
- Read each carrier's terms. The EU Court of Justice (C-30/14) held that the owner of an unprotected database can set contractual limits on its use. Use approved feeds where they exist.
The problem
What goes wrong without the right IPs
The cheapest fare is not in the feed you already have
GDS and aggregator content can miss direct-only fares and fare bundles. If your product compares low-cost and network carriers using only indirect content, the low-cost side is systematically too expensive or simply missing.
The price depends on how many seats you ask for
Low-cost carriers sell a flight in price steps. If one seat is left at the lowest step, a search for one adult shows it and a search for four does not. Query at the party sizes your users actually search, and store the party size with the price.
The calendar says one thing, the flight says another
Low-fare calendars are summary views and can lag the flight-level search. A 'from' price you cannot reproduce at flight level is not a fare; it is a lead. Confirm calendar minima on the flight search before you publish them.
Fees move on a different clock from fares
Bag, seat and priority prices change by route, date and demand, independently of the fare. A fare series without its fee series understates the cost of the trip. See airline ancillary prices.
Terms of use are part of the job
Some low-cost carriers prohibit commercial screen scraping in their website terms and have taken resellers to court. Read the terms before you collect, prefer an approved feed or aggregator agreement where the carrier offers one, never log in, and keep request volume modest. Our acceptable use policy applies too.
What to collect
What you can collect
- Leg and flight number
- Low-cost carriers price one-way legs. Build round trips from legs, not the other way round.
- Party size searched
- The visible price depends on how many seats remain at the lowest step.
- Fare per passenger
- The fare at that party size, in the market's currency.
- Fare bundle and inclusions
- Basic, plus and flex bundles change what a bag or seat costs on top.
- Mandatory fees in the first price shown
- Under EU case law, unavoidable items such as certain card or check-in fees must be in the initial price.
- Calendar 'from' price vs flight-level price
- The gap tells you how stale the calendar is on each route.
- Seats-left indicator, where shown
- A leading signal that the next price step is close.
- Market, currency and observation time
- Low-cost sites run country editions too; keep the point of sale explicit.
How it runs
How a collection run works
- 01
Build the leg list from public schedules
Pull route and schedule pages on the cheap rotating pool. Low-cost networks change by season, so refresh the leg list at each timetable change.
- 02
Scan calendars to find the cheap dates
Fetch the low-fare calendar per leg and market a few times a day. Calendar responses are small JSON documents, so this layer is cheap. It tells you where to look, not what to publish.
- 03
Confirm on the flight-level search
For the dates that matter, run the flight search with one sticky session per flow, at the party sizes you care about. This is the price you store and show.
- 04
Capture the bundle table
Record what each bundle costs and what it includes. The implied price of a bag inside a bundle is often the comparison your users want.
- 05
Join fares to fees
Join each fare to the ancillary prices observed on the same leg and date, so the product can show a trip price for one adult with a cabin bag, one with a hold bag, and so on.
Setup
Recommended setup
Calendars are light and can rotate. Flight-level searches are stateful and should hold one residential exit per flow.
| Plan | Role | Session | Targeting | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ARC Fast Rotating residential | Flight-level fare confirmation Residential exits in each carrier market, held from search to fare selection so the flow completes on one IP. | Sticky, 10 minutes per flow | Country | €2.00 / GB €1.12 at 1 TB (−44%) |
ARC Basic Rotating ISP | Calendars, schedules and route lists Small responses fetched often. The cheapest pool per GB keeps the scanning layer close to free. | Rotating | Country | €0.75 / GB €0.59 at 1 TB (−21%) |
ARC Ultra Premium residential | Your highest-traffic low-cost routes Premium residential for the routes where a missing or stale fare costs you users. Keep the rest on ARC Fast. | Sticky per flow | Country | €3.50 / GB €2.17 at 1 TB (−38%) |
Prices are list prices in EUR, excl. VAT. Volume discounts apply automatically at checkout — full ladder on the pricing page.
Connect
One connection string per market
The country, city and sticky session are tokens in the username. Change the token, change the market; keep the session handle, keep the IP.
http://USERNAME_pool-arcfast_country-de_session-k3f9a1x2_sesstime-10:PASSWORD@proxy.arcproxies.io:8000Swap _country-de for any market you quote. The full grammar is on the residential proxies page.
Illustration
What sixty low-cost legs in four markets costs
An illustration with round numbers — your pages, payloads and retry rate will differ. The arithmetic is the real price ladder.
Assumptions
- Legs monitored
- 60
- Calendar months per leg
- 3
- Markets
- 4
- Calendar scans
- 4 a day, 150 KB each
- Flight-level confirmations
- 10 dates per leg per market, daily
- Weight per confirmation flow
- 600 KB
- Bandwidth per month
- ≈ 57 GB
On ARC Fast
€95.76per month, excl. VAT
57 GB bought in one purchase at €1.68 / GB (−16% volume rung, applied automatically).
The same 57 GB on ARC Basic: €41.61 at €0.73 / GB. Move down as soon as the cheaper pool holds up.
The calendar layer is about 13 GB of this and the confirmations about 43 GB. Moving only the calendar scans to ARC Basic is the usual split.
Bandwidth never expires, so a bigger single purchase is only ever cheaper per GB. See the ladder.
In depth
Low-cost carrier fares, in depth
Why low-cost carrier fares need their own collection
Low-cost carriers are a large share of European flying. EUROCONTROL put them at 32.5% of flights in January–September 2022, up from 30.3% in 2018 and close to zero in 1998. Any European fare product without them is incomplete.
Their distribution is direct-first. When Wizz Air announced its first content-aggregator partnership in August 2025, it said its lowest fares and full range of ancillary products would remain available on its own website and app. Indirect feeds are widening, but the airline's own channel is still the reference price.
So the job is different from airline fare scraping for network carriers. There are fewer markets to worry about and more structure to capture: legs, seat steps, bundles and fees. The rest of the travel fare aggregation setup still applies.
How low-cost pricing behaves, and how to collect it
| Mechanism | What you observe | How to collect |
|---|---|---|
| One-way leg pricing | A return is the sum of two independently priced legs | Collect legs; assemble trips downstream |
| Seat price steps | Price jumps when the cheapest seats sell | Search at fixed party sizes; record seats-left hints |
| Fare bundles | Basic, plus and flex tiers on the same flight | Store every bundle and its inclusions, not just the cheapest |
| Low-fare calendar | A month of 'from' prices in one response | Use it to choose dates; confirm at flight level |
| Unbundled fees | Bags, seats and priority priced separately | Run a fee series alongside the fare series |
| Country editions | Different currency and sometimes different promotions | Exit and site edition per market, as with any airline |
Which fees belong in the price you store
EU case law draws the line between unavoidable and optional items, and that line tells you what the first price shown on an EU site should already include.
- Checked baggage is optional. In C-487/12 (Vueling, 2014) the Court held that a checked-bag price is not an unavoidable item but may be an optional supplement. Hand baggage, by contrast, is in principle necessary and cannot be charged as a supplement if it meets reasonable weight and size requirements and security rules.
- Check-in fees depend on the alternative. In C-28/19 (2020) the Court held that an online check-in fee is optional if at least one free check-in method exists, and unavoidable, and so part of the initial price, if none does.
- Card fees can be unavoidable. The same judgment held that fees for paying with a card other than the one the carrier approves are unavoidable and foreseeable, and must be in the initial offer.
In practice, store the initial price as displayed, store each optional fee separately, and flag any fee that appears only at payment. That is a description of the case law, not legal advice.
Terms of use, approved channels and the CJEU database ruling
In January 2015, the Court of Justice ruled in C-30/14 that the EU Database Directive's mandatory user rights do not apply to a database that is protected neither by copyright nor by the sui generis right, so the directive does not prevent the owner from setting contractual conditions on its use. In plain terms, a website's terms can matter even where database law does not apply.
So read the terms of every carrier you monitor. Where a carrier offers an approved route to its content, such as an API, an affiliate feed or an aggregator agreement, that is the cleaner and more durable option. Where you do collect public pages, stay logged out, respect robots.txt, keep concurrency low and do not resell what you are not allowed to resell. Collecting travel data responsibly goes through the checklist.
Party size, seat steps and the 'from' price
The most common low-cost data bug is an advertised price nobody can book. It happens when a calendar minimum for one passenger is shown to a family of four, or when a fare collected yesterday is shown after its step has sold.
Collect at the party sizes your users search, typically one, two and four adults. Show prices with their observation time. For anything that triggers a notification, re-confirm live first: the fare alerts page describes the confirm-before-send pattern, and how often flight prices change helps you set the refresh rate.
Works with anything that takes a proxy URL
Playwright- Python requests / httpx
Crawlee- Node.js
- Docker
FAQ
Questions
Something not covered? Write to contact@arcproxies.io.
Are low-cost airline fares available in GDS feeds?
Partly, and it varies by carrier. Many low-cost carriers sell mainly on their own website and app, and some say their lowest fares and full ancillary range stay there even when they distribute through aggregators. To see the price a traveller sees on the carrier's own channel, you have to look at that channel.
Why does a low-cost fare change when I search for more passengers?
Low-cost carriers sell each flight in price steps. If only one seat remains at the cheapest step, a one-passenger search shows it and a four-passenger search prices every seat at the next step. Always store the party size with the price.
Should I collect low-cost fares one way or return?
One way. Low-cost carriers generally price each leg independently, so a return is the sum of two legs. Collecting legs lets you build any combination downstream without searching every pair of dates.
Which low-cost fees must be in the first price shown in the EU?
Unavoidable and foreseeable ones. The EU Court of Justice has held that a checked bag is an optional supplement, that online check-in fees are unavoidable when no free check-in method exists, and that fees for paying with a card other than the carrier's approved one are unavoidable. Optional supplements must be shown clearly at the start of booking, on an opt-in basis.
Is it allowed to scrape low-cost airline websites?
It depends on the site's terms, the data and your jurisdiction. The EU Court of Justice has held that the owner of a database without copyright or sui generis protection can impose contractual limits on its use. Read each carrier's terms, use an approved feed where one exists, stay logged out and keep volumes modest. Ask counsel for a definitive answer in your case.
How much bandwidth does low-cost fare monitoring use?
Calendar scans are small JSON responses, often around 100–200 KB. A flight-level search flow in a headless browser with assets blocked is typically several hundred kilobytes. Sixty legs in four markets with daily confirmations comes to roughly 55 GB a month in our illustration, billed per GB with no expiry.
Sources & review
Last reviewed by the ARC Proxies team. Prices are read from the live catalog at build time.
- [1]EUROCONTROL: Data Snapshot #34 on the rise of Low Cost Carriers in Europe
- [2]Travelfusion: Wizz Air expands its customer portfolio by reaching millions of new customers through partnership with Travelfusion
- [3]Court of Justice of the European Union: Press release No 127/14: Judgment in Case C-487/12, Vueling Airlines
- [4]Court of Justice of the European Union: Press release No 49/20: Judgment in Case C-28/19, Ryanair and Others v AGCM
- [5]EUR-Lex (Court of Justice of the European Union): Judgment of 15 January 2015, Ryanair Ltd v PR Aviation BV, Case C-30/14
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