Many of us will have heard the jokes about how some airlines will offer to fly you to a particular city, only to discover once you arrive there that you have landed tens of miles away from your desired destination and that you then face an hour (or sometimes more) traveling by surface transport to reach the city that you wanted to visit.

Airports such as Paris-Beauvais (BVA), London-Luton (LTN), Frankfurt-Hahn (HHN),   and Brussels-Charleroi (CRL) are all good examples of this, where you think you will be dropped close to the city that the airport is named after, yet your arrival at the airport represents only half of your journey.    

This phenomenon has become a more frequent occurrence since the dawn of mass low-cost air travel in the late 1990s. Out-of-town regional airports often offer relatively cheaper fees (such as landing fees, parking charges, and handling costs) than their rivals located closer to the cities they serve. This in turn means that the airline can reflect these lower fees by offering cheaper fares to those airports. But of course, this does mean that the responsibility for reaching those cities falls on the passengers themselves, which can often be seen as inconvenient at best, and disingenuous at worst.   

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