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Old Sep 24, 2017, 7:15 am
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corporate-wage-slave
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It's a European low cost carrier, and to the average traveller there won't be a lot of difference between easyJet, Ryanair, Norwegian, W!zz or Vueling. Norwegian has wifi, easyJet has the most engaged crew, Vueling the most laid back about cabin luggage, but frankly this is all on the margins, people chose the airlines not based on brands, but on fares and timetables, and at that level they are much of a muchness. Don't expect a lot of leg room on any of them. Ratings on the two sites mentioned are somewhere between useless and misleading, if any of them was that was not doing the job asked of them by their customers, they would be out of business by now. If you're after the finer things in life then you're not flying economy on low cost carriers.

Now for reliability we can move to statistics. One particularly useful route is LGW to BCN since easyJet, Vueling, Norwegian and British Airways all compete more than once a day on that route, Monarch have a one a day flight 6 days a week. So the figures there are online on the CAA website, and if we take January 2017 (a tough month due to weather and congestion at both airports).

Airline - Flights - percent on time - average minutes late.
Vueling - 215 - 69.3% - 18.7 minutes
easyJet - 258 - 75.2% - 12.6 minutes
Norwegian - 56 - 57.1% - 26.4 minutes
BA - 72 - 73.6% - 13.5 minutes
Monarch - 24 - 79.2% - 13.1 minutes

On time percentage allows for a maximum of 15 minutes delay. So Vueling are not the best, not the worst for reliability, but in common with most airlines in Europe they do run their equipment and staff fairly intensively with very little contingency. Mostly this works. Cancellations are not easily recorded, but due to EC261 pretty much all airlines do their best to avoid cancellations at the last moment, I can't point to a difference between any of them.

For baggage, don't think it terms of leeway with any of these airlines, just factor the cost of checked baggage into the relevant total cost comparisons.
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