Follow the competition to find a cheap bank holiday city break

The man who pays his way

Competition on the Luton-Copenhagen route is hotting up

Fancy a city break over next weekend’s bank holiday? As usual, air fares for a city break flying out on Friday and back on Monday are uncomfortably high; the cheapest deal I could find from Birmingham to Rome was £297 return, with Bristol to Barcelona slightly better at £195. And the cheapest deal for a short hop from Heathrow to Amsterdam is £336 return.

Yet there are some city-break routes on which fares are being sold at way below cost, even on these peak dates. “Attrition city breaks”, I call them, because they result from ferocious fares wars between the budget airlines.

Stansted to Edinburgh comes in at £53 return, while between Glasgow and Stansted, the fare is just £47 return. Air Passenger Duty alone accounts for £26 of this fare – and since under-16s don’t pay the aviation tax, a family of four can fly between Scotland’s largest city and the English capital for a total of just £136 – only £34 each.

Ryanair and easyJet usually avoid head-to-head battles, but they are locked into a formidable fares war between Stansted and the two biggest Scottish airports. As a result, one-way fares on most days in May are £12.99 – a penny less than the Chancellor earns from the flight in APD.

The two no-frills giants are also competing from Luton to Copenhagen, a battle that is reverberating to other London airports. The best long-weekend deal is £113 return, flying out from Gatwick to the Danish capital on Norwegian and returning to Luton on Ryanair. For comparison, the fare from Birmingham airport – about an hour up the M1 – is £194.

The effects of competition are clear between Edinburgh and Paris. Transavia, the low-cost offshoot of Air France/KLM this week launches the route between the Scottish and French capitals against easyJet and Flybe. For travellers who don’t mind flying out to one Paris airport (Charles de Gaulle) and back from another (Orly), bank-holiday fares are as low as £120 return. That is one-fifth cheaper than from the nearest alternative airport, Glasgow, and half the price of flying from Newcastle - where Air France has a monopoly to Paris.

For travellers from Tyneside, the bank holiday route of choice is Newcastle to Dublin. It’s a very reasonable £85 return, taking advantage of the rivalry between Aer Lingus (now a sister company of British Airways) and Ryanair.

Luton is turning out to be a real battleground this summer. Vueling (another BA sibling) has set up shop on key easyJet routes to Amsterdam and Barcelona. This impertinent move into easyJet’s home turf is keeping fares to the Dutch capital down over the bank holiday. The cheapest deal, out Friday and back Monday, is £136 – is exactly £200 less than the lowest fare to and from Heathrow, on KLM. BA’s cheapest for the hour-long hop is £414.

Ralph Anker, chief analyst for the route-planning website, anna.aero, says fares from a range of UK airports to Spain’s largest cities could also be competitive: “Vueling is flying to Barcelona from Leeds/Bradford, Newcastle and Liverpool, against a combination of Jet2, Monarch, easyJet and Ryanair.

“Another good one is Birmingham-Madrid. Three summers ago, no-one flew this route. Then Monarch and Norwegian started, joined this summer by Iberia and Ryanair, making a total of 14 flights a week.”

That could prove particularly useful for helping families from the Midlands avoid the school holiday peaks to key resort airports. Birmingham-Malaga on 24 July for a week is currently priced at £297, but the fare to Madrid is 60 per cent less – with cheap and easy connections by high-speed train to the Costa del Sol.

All these fares are hand-baggage only, and assume that you avoid unnecessary extras such as seat selection and priority boarding. They were all researched on Tuesday this week; fares will tend to increase closer to departure, but those on more competitive routes may actually fall. A test booking from Luton to Copenhagen, travelling just 24 hours later, revealed a fare of only £34 return – astonishing value for 1,200 miles of air travel.

Looking further ahead, Toronto could be the long-haul city break of choice for the summer. In May, the leading Canadian budget airline, WestJet, is moving in to Gatwick, as is the Air Canada low-cost offshoot, Rouge. Both will be up against the long-serving airline, Air Transat. Fares for the late May bank holiday weekend are widely available at under £400 – around £100 lower than to New York, which is 100 miles closer to London.