greuzi the lo-cos have a wide variety of pax. You'll find some very rich people fly with them and a lot of celebs do too, purely cos they are flying to european destinations whereby a meal isn't necessary so there is not always a reason to fly with a more expensive airline if the ticket price is hugely different. At the end of the day, economy differs little betwene airlines except with those that offer IFE and meals. A lot of pax are actually leaving the likes of BA because of the economic downturn and moving to lo-cos. The pax loads at EZY have been up quite a fair amount of the past few months whereas BA's have started to dip so bizarrely, the credit crunch is actually good for the lo-cos as like you said, people still need to fly, they just now want to pay less for the privelege :P