I’d say yes, especially on longer flights. You get considerable more space.

Just this year I took a A320 from a national carrier and a few days later a A320 from easyJet. They literally crammed 7 more rows into the same type of aircraft.

When I traveled enough for work to build up frequent flyer status with a single carrier, yes, it was worth it. I picked which carrier to build status with based on routes available from where I lived and where I traveled most often. And candidate carriers were the larger name-brand ones because they had more routes.

As an individual traveling once or twice a year for vacation now, I just go with what’s inexpensive, meets my schedule, and doesn’t have a shit layover like 30 min or 4+ hours. I don’t travel enough to build up a frequent flyer status, which is where perks with any particular airline kick in.

Depends what you’re after, really. If you want absolutely no extras, economy at budget airline is probably fine.

I’ve flown enough to prefer the “normal” airlines for what is included: yes, I need to bring a carry-on. And yes, I have checked luggage in addition to that. Sometimes several. And some of them are often heavy as fuck. No extra charge at a normal airline.

At a budget airline, anything beyond getting you and only you from A to B is an extra, and extra services carry a cost. And I absolutely detest the paperwork involved in filing an expense claim.

Also, when I’m flying, I’m either flying to work and want to arrive well rested, or I’m finally on my way home and can finally unwind. For these reasons I prefer to chill in a lounge during my connection, and/or upgrade to business class on the longer flights. Budget airlines usually don’t have any of those as an option.

As far as I can recall, I haven’t been left to fend for myself by a budget airline delay cancelation, at least not to a significant degree. But whenever something unexpected happens with the normal airline happens it seems they always have a good routine in place to make sure everything is taken care of, including rebooking, sorting out any connection complications, overnight stay at a proper hotel. Previous time this happened I got to pick any flight the following day that worked with my schedule, as opposed to being shoved into an early and really inconvenient one.

Around 10 years ago I switched to a specific big airline and started building frequent flyer status. Before that I was willing to do the regular budget airlines (Southwest, Frontier, JetBlue) for $100 savings or the ultra budget airlines (Spirit, Allegiant) for another $100 savings over that.

But I’ve had bad experiences with Frontier (canceled flight, next available flight not available for 3 days) and Spirit (more time on the tarmac than in the air). Both resulted in missed events (and for the Frontier flight I needed to just buy a last minute ticket, out of pocket, with another airline).

So now, when it’s important for me to be on time, I tend to prefer airlines that have multiple flights per day between my origin and destination, and have some redundancy and resilience against the unexpected. There are still network effects that provide some major value, to where I’m generally willing to pay $200 more for flights on my preferred airline.

Not to me, no. No matter which airline it’s still uncomfortable, the in-flight stuff is irrelevant to me as I take my own headphones/tablet/snacks, and I only ever take carry on other than big international trips, which budget carriers don’t do here.