A crash course in how to fly from the US to Europe for under $200

Hey, blog-o-pals! I thought I would make a nice user-friendly basic guide on how to fly between Europe and the US for under $200 each way, so here it is:

Basically, there are a few low-cost airlines that have reliably cheap fares. There's my personal favorite, Norwegian Air, my least favorite, WowAir, and a very promising airline I haven't flown yet, Thomas Cook Airlines.

Norwegian: 
Budget: $300-500 round trip to Scandinavia. Requires significant flexibility.

5 reasons to fly with Norwegian Air:
1. You live near New York, Boston, Miami, Orlanda, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas.
2. You are flying to Scandinavia (Norway, Denmark, or Sweden). You can fly from New York to Oslo for $100-180 except in the summer. (Or, you are flying to London, but the other airlines are usually cheaper. New York to London direct will generally cost you at least $250-300, and often more.)
3. You can buy your tickets in advance.
4. You are not flying in the summer or around holidays.
5. You are bringing 1 carry-on suitcase and a small personal item.

WowAir:
Budget: $200-300 round trip to Iceland. Requires some flexibility.

5 reasons to fly with WowAir:
1. You live near Boston or Baltimore. (They also have slightly more expensive flights from Los Angeles and San Francisco.)
2. You are flying to Iceland or Bristol, UK. (Often $99-129 one-way direct from the East coast to Reykjavik! About $200 to Bristol, which is an unusual place for a discount transatlantic airline to go to, but is a great city and the legendary graffiti artist, Banksy, is from there.)
3. You are bringing only a very, very lightweight personal item and NO carry on, and you can plan in advance.
4. You want the absolute lowest price possible, and you are willing to be treated somewhat poorly. The planes are small, and there are no movies or fun moving maps that show you where you are on the globe. WowAir is the Greyhound bus of the skies.
5. You want a stopover in Iceland, before continuing on to Europe. All WowAir flights stop in Iceland to refuel anyway, and you can schedule in a free stopover.

Thomas Cook:
Budget: $400-600 round trip to the UK. Requires little flexibility.

5 reasons to fly with Thomas Cook Airlines:
1. You live near New York, Boston, or Miami. Slightly more expensive flights are available from Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Orlando, Minneapolos, Portland (Oregon), and Seattle.
2. You are flying to the UK. The best prices are to Manchester and Scotland, but there are locations all over the country.
3. You are flying to all the places in Europe that the discount airlines don't go to, such as a huge variety of cities in France, Germany, Scandinavia, and Amsterdam.
4. You don't want a "discount airline" experience, but you still want to save some money. Thomas Cook Airlines is NOT a discount airline--they just have rock-bottom prices that you can only find on their website. The flights include a multi-course meal and checked baggage. The prices are sometimes a little higher than on WowAir--New York to Manchester will generally cost $250-300 one-way--but you save a lot of time by flying direct. Plus, if you're lucky, you can find a flight like the $150 Boston to Manchester flight I found recently.
5. You don't want to plan in advance. You can book months in advance, or you can leave this week, and you will probably still find a $150-300 flight to the UK. This, combined with the fancy airline experience, is the best thing about Thomas Cook. Now, I haven't flown with them yet, so I can't confirm that the food is good, but they talk it up a lot on their website, and apparently it has the stamp of approval of a famous TV chef, so it's got to be better than the big load of nothing you get on the discount airlines.

Still have questions? Got tips? Comment and let me know!