A new advert for Ryanair in a Norwegian newspaper offers flights from Oslo to "London Prestwick" airport. Prestwick international airport is located 30 miles from Glasgow, and nearly 400 miles from London.

A budget airline may have broken its own record for dropping its passengers off at airports miles from their destinations.

Customers frequently moan that Frankfurt-Hahn airport is about 75 miles from Frankfurt, or that it takes one hour and ten minutes on the bus to get from Barcelona-Girona airport to Barcelona.

But a new advert for Ryanair tops them all, offering flights from Oslo to "London Prestwick" airport. Prestwick international airport is located 30 miles from Glasgow, and nearly 400 miles from London.

The advert appeared in a Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten on Monday, as part of a promotion in which passengers would pay only the taxes and charges for their flights. A trip from Oslo to "London Prestwick" would cost only 176 Norwegian kroner (approximately £15.70).

Neil Richardson, a spokesman for Prestwick airport, said that he was not aware of any customers who had turned up expecting to have arrived in - or at least reasonably near - the British capital.

A statement from the airport said that "anyone arriving here expecting the bright lights and busy streets of London might be surprised when they realise we are right next to the sea", but promised that "once exposed to the Scottish hospitality and culture", any baffled Norwegians would "soon forget about their intended destination".

Ryanair is rarely far from controversy. In recent months, the company has announced it would charge passengers up to £5 to check in their bags, refused to repay tax to customers who cancelled their tickets, produced adverts parodying Winston Churchill a week after the London bombings ("We shall fly them to the beaches..."), charged disabled people £18 to use wheelchairs and kicked blind people off a flight because there were too many of them.

Its boss, Michael O'Leary, has picked fights with the civil aviation authority, British Airways and airports in Dublin and Brussels, while its critics blame it for global warming and its ex-employees complain bitterly about working conditions on a popular blog.

But - along with easyJet - its low-cost flights have transformed British holidaymaking. As the Economist noted in a recent article, "in recent years, Stelios Haji-Ioannou and Michael O'Leary, the two pioneers of Europe's low-cost airlines, have done more to integrate Europe than any numbers of diplomats and ministers. They have helped to create a new generation for whom travelling to another European country is no longer exotic or expensive, but utterly commonplace."