Next: No-Frills Pizza? The founder of easyJet has plans for cruises, buses, phones...(Stelios Haji-Ioannou)

Byline: William Underhill

Cheapskates everywhere: that Mediterranean cruise could be within reach at last. There'll be no free ride to the port, and no free food or entertainment on board. The cabin will measure 30 meters square and housekeeping will be extra. But the fiberglass suite is easy to clean, and costs as little as 29 pounds a night.

Earlier this year, serial entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the man who gave Europe its first budget airline, cashed in 14 million pounds of his easyJet shares to fund what he calls a "little shopping spree." Boldly expanding his no-frills model into new markets, Stelios (he insists on first-name informality) plans to open the first easyHotel in London this year with prices from 5 pounds a night, an easyBus fleet and easyCruise, slated to sail next summer. Also on the list: easyPizzas and easyTelecom, a mobile-phone service.

Can he make it work? The soaring success of easyJet and its rivals was Europe's great business story of the late 1990s, and yet more carriers are emerging to serve the 10 nations that joined the European Union last week. While copycatting the idea may look like a no-brainer, though, some experts doubt Stelios's expansion plans have much of a future. "The no-frills model is very fragile," says Chris Voss of London Business School. "Stelios is applying it rather indiscriminately."

The entrepreneur's record is mixed. He launched easyJet in 1995, when he was 28, and it now has 70 planes and revenues of 932 pounds million last year, up nearly 70 percent from 2002. But his first attempt to clone the no-frills model, a Europe-wide chain of Internet cafes launched at the height of the bubble, has since struggled to make money. His first easyCinema--tickets for just 50 pence--is suffering because big distributors, fearful of undercutting their other business, refuse to allow cheap screenings of new blockbusters.

The larger problem: slashing prices is not enough to make no-frills work. Stelios, for example, likes to sell direct to the customer, preferably online, and avoids corporate accounts on the theory that only individuals care enough about price to be loyal no-frills customers. He chooses only sectors in which the volume of business will clearly rise as prices fall. There's no point, say, in offering a cut-rate burial service. Says Stelios: "The demand for funerals isn't going to go up--regardless of the price."

He searches for businesses where he can practice "yield management." The ...