IT WAS the golden age of low-cost flights… from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s, budget flights really were dirt cheap.

The sale of seats for 1p (plus tax) actually happened.

It took a bit of getting used to – everyone was just learning how to buy things on the internet (as difficult as that is to imagine now) – but you could book flights to places you couldn’t spell or pronounce in eastern Europe for the cost of a night out in a curry house.

And, tentatively at first, we did. During lunch breaks we clicked on easyJet and Ryanair and discovered a whole new world of travel. Traditional airlines were forced to make massive changes to cope with their new streamlined competition. Soon flights across the globe were tumbling and we have not looked back.

How Low Can You Go? captures the excitement of this period of great transformation, describing high-jinks in the likes of Poland, Bulgaria, Finland and Estonia. It also calls to question whether so much flying is really a good thing, with interviews with Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of easyJet, and Tony Juniper, then head of Friends of the Earth.

When easyJet began its cheap flights from Luton to Glasgow in 1995 – for ‘the price of a pair of jeans’ went the ads at the time (£29) – something changed forever in the way we travel.