The closest one is the Radisson SAS which is directly next to the airport and has a covered walkway, from the arrivals hall just follow the signs for the train station and the hotel signs will be there too. Rated at four stars. Typical Radisson classy design complete with good amenities such as swimming pool and gym.

The other one to recommend would be the Hilton Hotel which was the older version. Features much the same amenities but sadly the Hilton name isn’t the 5-star guarantee that it used to be and quality has been surpassed by other brands. What this does have going for it is price (there are often specials on) and parking facilities. It can often work out at a really good price to use the hotel car park rather than to pay for airport parking. The Hilton is located near the long-stay car park and they give you a free bus transfer there, which takes around 5 minutes.

Sometimes an airport hotel may seem to be another wasted expense, but sometimes it can work out in your favour, if you have a sitation as follows:

- Early morning flight: The worst case for UK airports is that your flight leaves at 6am. This means arriving at Stansted at least 4.30am (this is the time I would recommend to allow sufficient time to negate queues and get to your gate in time). Getting to the airport at this time is pretty difficult although not impossible on public transport.

- Tiredness: Especially when you need to feel alert. Having an airport hotel almost certainly means you’ll have a less stressful night, having nothing to worry about at home, nor having to get up at an insanely early hour. If you’re having, say, a job interview, this will be crucial. If you’ve got a weekend abroad, that first day won’t be ruined by you feeling like a zombie, and you’ll get quite a lot done.

- Parking: As alluded to earlier, parking can be expensive at airports and even the long-term park at Stansted costs over £7.00 a day (and increases every year). Going away for a week may mean that staying in a hotel kills all the above problems and saves you money on parking.

- Food: If you have children, or are travelling with other people, the airport is perhaps the worst place to get breakfast; you will likely not see change from £10 for a full English breakfast. Staying at a hotel, breakfast is included and you often can eat as much as you want.

Do check with the hotel and try to book as far as much in advance as possible. Not only to avoid the disappointment of a full hotel, but also special offers may be available. As with flights, the worst value is for people just turning up.

Useful Links:

Hilton Hotel
Radisson SAS
All Hotels near the Airport

The bad news is that the codes are pretty strictly monitored and often have start and end dates which are adhered to. The reason for this is that flight prices mechanisms are very precise; they’d have to be considering the nature of the low-cost airline industry. For example, a glitch which discounted every passenger £5 on one flight could be enough to turn a flight from a profit making one to a loss-making one. Just look at the airline profits versus passenger numbers.

Here’s a good place to look for codes:
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=333742&page=12

Don’t forget to book on Easyjet to check if the codes are working; if booking via another site like Expedia you won’t qualify for discount.

Austria: Graz, Klagenfurt, Linz, Salzburg

Belgium: Brussels-Charleroi

Bulgaria: Plovdiv

Croatia: Pula, Zadar, Osijek

Denmark: Aarhus, Billund

Finland: Tampere, Lappeenranta

France: Bergerac, Beziers, Biarritz, Bordeaux, Brest, Carcassonne,  Dinard, Figari, Grenoble, La Rochelle, Lille, Limoges, Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes, Nice, Nimes, Paris-Beauvais, Paris-Vatry, Pau, Perpingnan, Poitiers, Rodez, Saint-Etienne, Toulon, Tours

Germany: Altenburg, Karlsruhe, Berlin-Schonefeld, Bremen, Frankfurt-Hahn, Hamburg-Lubeck, Memmingen, Dusseldorf-Weeze

Greece: Kos, Rhodes, Volos

Hungary: Budapest

Italy: Alghero, Ancona, Bari, Bologna, Brescia, Brindisi, Cagliari, Cuneo, Genoa, Lamezia, Milan-Bergamo, Palermo, Parma, Perugia, Pescara, Pisa, Rimini, Rome-Ciampino, Trapani, Trieste, Turin, Venice-Treviso, Verona

Latvia: Riga

Lithuania: Kaunas

Malta: Malta

Morocco: Agadir, Fez, Marrakech, Nador, Oujda, Tangier

Netherlands: Eindhoven, Maastricht

Norway: Haugesund, Oslo-Torp, Oslo-Rygge

Poland: Bydgoszcz, Gdansk, Katowice, Krakow, Lodz, Poznan, Rzeszow, Szczecin, Wroclaw

Portugal: Faro, Porto

Romania: Constanta

Slovakia: Bratislava

Spain: Alicante, Almeria, Barcelona, Ciudad Real, Fuerteventura, Girona, Gran Canaria, Grenada, Ibiza, Jerez, Lanzarote, Lleida, Madrid, Malaga, Murcia, Palma Mallorca, Reus, Santander, Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Tenerife, Valencia, Valladolid, Zaragoza

Sweden: Gothenburg, Norrkoping, Stockholm-Skavsta, Stockholm-Vasteras, Vaxjo

United Kingdom: Aberdeen, Belfast, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Bristol, Derry, Doncaster, East Midlands, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds-Bradford, Liverpool, London-Gatwick, London-Luton, London-Stansted, Manchester, Newcastle Newquay

Nevertheless, with Torp and Rygge being especially important in terms of low-cost flights and the main airport specialising in more longer-haul flights, it can save you quite a good amount of cash to take the right way. Here, we’ll detail the best ways we have found. Journeys are one-way only, simply reverse it to get the other journey.

Gardermoen to Torp (or Torp to Gardermoen): Two options you can take: the first option involves taking the Express Bus to Oslo Central Station, and then from there a train to Gardermoen; total journey time may be around 2 hours give or take a little for waiting times. This is the most popular method and recommended if you are on a tight schedule as the services are more or less guaranteed. Alternatively, you can take the free shuttle bus to Torp station, from which you can board a Lillehammer-bound train which will take you directly to Gardermoen. This is less frequent and may leave a long wait particularly if you are unlucky with your flight arrival time so it’s best to check the departure times at http://www.nsb.no/getfile.php/www.nsb.no/nsb.no/PDF/Rutetabeller/20-Skien-Oslo-Lillehammer-2009.pdf

Gardermoen to Rygge (or Rygge to Gardermoen): Rygge is slightly less connected than Torp but is still possible, and offers a shorter journey time. You can catch a bus from Rygge airport to Oslo Central which will leave you a train journey to the airport. Alternatively the F11 Fly Express Bus will take you to Rygge station, from which there is a free transfer to the airport.

Torp to Rygge (or Rygge to Torp): The most difficult because of the geographical nature of the airports, lying either side of the fjord. You can make the journey via a combination of airport buses, or trains as detailed above. These journeys will take in excess of three hours so do allow plenty of time to make connections. It is possible to make the ferry crossing from Moss-Horten, but the nearest train service to Torp would be from the town of Skoppum (about a 20 minute bus ride away). From Torp station you can get the free shuttle bus. Total journey time would be slightly shorter at around 2.5 hours but with many changes required, not recommended unless you have a lot of time in case something goes wrong.

1) Private Transfer: There are many companies offering ‘private transfers’; essentially what these amount to is little more than a taxi service with a veichle appropriate to however many passengers you might have. The good news is that most now have websites and are in English; Google around for their pages – some may already be placing ads on our site. The cost of this is not cheap if you use this, but perhaps economical if you have several passengers.

2) Coach service: There is a little known ‘Paris Vatry Shuttle’ which is not well advertised on the airport website. This coach service is only available to airport passengers, so one would guess that it’s subsidised by the airport. The price is a reasonable 25 Euro return from the airport, considering the length of journey and the coach will stop at the following points:
Reims Train Station 
Vatry Airport
Chalons en Champagne Train Station
Cheyenne Hotel (Disney)
Disneyland Hotel (Disney)
New York Hotel (Disney)
Chessy Marne-la Vallee Station (Disney)
Santa Fe Hotel (Disney)
Sequoia Hotel (Disney)
Newport Bay Hotel (Disney)
Davy Crockett Ranch Hotel (Disney)

You can find a timetable at http://paris-disney-champagne.for-system.com/index_uk.aspx; do note all passengers need to have travelled via plane to Vatry, to underscore this, the bus only coincides with flight landings.

3) Train: You may want to consider if there is any difference in cost to take the train: particularly if you can get to London, Amsterdam, Brussels or Frankfurt for the TGV fast train. Disney has it’s own train station (the Marne la Vallee) which may mean you can cut out all the transfer problems by going via an airport with better connections. Even going via Paris CDG may save you some cash in the long run if time is factored in.

Of course, even if the priority line had been long, there were very few people that moaned. The reason being that the priority boarding was free (it was a paid upgrade at that point as well) and in fact many online-checked in people felt pretty good about getting something for free, not too sure about those who paid for it.

Nowadays, the maximum number of passengers that can purchase priority boarding is limited to 80 as you can see here: http://www.ryanair.com/en/news/gen-en-190508 ; clearly to have any more than this would defeat the point of ‘priority’ boarding as it would be likely that some people would be in the last 50% of people to board the aircraft. We very much doubt that this limit has ever been breached although we stand to be corrected.

But looking at the recent developments – Ryanair now fly to Kos, Volos and Rhodes in Greece, it may be that the tourist resorts in Turkey will be the first to get some service.

Currently Easyjet fly to Istanbul, Antalya, Bodrum and Dalaman, which are your best options. Fares are high though, and even out of season don’t expect to see much below £30 one-way and that is booking far in advance. The closest Ryanair will take you is Bucharest, from where you can travel to Istanbul via train or coach.

It’s doubtful whether Ryanair will ever be back; Switzerland is a country that isn’t the best for low-cost airlines owing to high charges, with Zurich pricing out most would be carriers here, even from the closest countries. Which leaves Basel as the countries main LCC destination and this is served by Easyjet, and it’s franchise, Easyjet Switzerland.

The closest airports otherwise; some will be better than others depending on your destination.

1) Strasbourg
2) Stuttgart
3) Karlsruhe
4) Milan Bergamo
5) Verona (Brescia)
6) Lyon
7) Grenoble
Torino

Need a pre-paid card to dodge Ryanair fees? We’ve teamed up with FairFX to offer you their anywhere card – get one for FREE (usually £9.95 for loading under £500). Any currency – anywhere – it’s ideal for everyone.

Easyjet will take you into the main Munich airport and there are few alternatives: Salzburg and Innsbruck being roughly the same distance away.

A quick call to customer services, and they reckon that it’ll be on the website in the coming week, although I wouldn’t back that with any conviction here to deliver it on time. The price being 79 Euros or £69 including delivery anywhere in Europe, it’ll be interesting to see how these will be sold. Will they, for instance, charge for use of debit/credit cards like their booking engine? And what differentiation will there be against cheaper Samsonite models, apart from the design?

Ryanair already have a tie up with an on-line mall, www.ryanairbuyasyoufly.com – I’m surprised they did not allow distribution via this channel as there would also be the opportunity to purchase in flight – where customers could actually see it – and get it delivered, which would save a hell of a lot of work on the logistics side.