A cheap ticket can be undone in ninety minutes at the airport. The costs are all small, all avoidable, and all easier to handle at home than at a desk with a queue behind you.
Before you leave
Check in online: several airlines, low-cost ones especially, charge for doing it at the airport, and a few charge for printing a boarding pass there too. Save the pass to your phone and screenshot it, because airport wifi and a nearly flat battery arrive together.
Weigh the bag at home. An excess-baggage charge at the desk is priced to be painful and can exceed what you paid for the seat. While you are at it, confirm your terminal: at large airports the wrong one is a taxi ride, not a walk.
Security and the gate
Keep liquids and electronics where you can reach them without unpacking, wear shoes you can take off, and empty your pockets before you reach the tray. Arrive with a buffer you would be embarrassed to admit to; rushing is where expensive mistakes happen.
On a connection, check the onward gate the moment you land, because gates change after you have memorised the old one.
The small traps
Airside water at three times the price, the bag that was a centimetre too big, the printed pass, the taxi nobody planned. None of them is large. Together they are the difference between a good fare and an ordinary one.
