The Image comes from OAG which is a more respected source though.

Only to compete with Norwegian in an attempt to finish them off and get their Gatwick slots. As soon as that didn't work, they pulled out. There's only so long you can fly empty aircraft around to try to damage a competitor.

I wonder if they might do BFS and EDI since those two airports, along with LGW and Wizzair, were co-signatories to a letter requesting a return to the 80/20 slot rules. BFS and EDI aren't directly affected by such rules, but perhaps Wizz have said to them 'We'll serve you from LGW if we can get more slots there".

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/bri...zz-2021-11-09/

There is only so long you can fly empty aircraft around and try to get away with shady employment practices. Have basically the whole country against you with even the PM calling travellers to boycott you resulting load factors around 20%. Divert much as your OM designed for CEE simply bans operation in conditions the locals flying in and out without problem. Then leave the whole country in a hurry (like two weeks notice) a day before the local CAA would conduct a hearing/audit about the mentioned practices. It had nothing to do with Norwegian.

And why do you think they entered the Norway domestic market in the first place? It had everything to do with Norwegian.

Norwegian was already dead by that time. Itt was because of a hundred aircraft being grounded for covid and another twenty being delivered each year without prospect of flying. They thought domestic flying was the way ahead against travel restrictions between countries. That's why they launched large scale domestic ops in Norway and Italy. As usual they got it wrong. Norway is cancelled, Italy just got chopped. 60-70 aircraft are still on ground with 2-3 new deliveries each month. Next stint is LGW and then god knows what.

If they've got 70 aircraft grounded, it's surprising they have subchartered Titan at Luton.

Wizz will launch six new daily routes on 27 March – Faro, Palma, Vienna, Rome, Milan and Tel Aviv. Daily Chania flights will start on 7 April followed by daily Larnaca flights on 11 April.Other additions include:

• Naples (four-times-weekly on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, starting 27 March)
• Funchal (twice-weekly on Mondays and Fridays, starting 28 March)
• Bari (twice-weekly on Tuesdays and Saturdays, starting 29 March)
• Podgorica (four-times-weekly on Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, starting 7 April)
• Catania (three-times-weekly on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, starting 8 April)
• Mykonos (four-times-weekly on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, starting 12 April)

Wizz’s additional Gatwick aircraft will also operate several existing routes, including Malaga and Athens. In total, Wizz will offer 22 seasonal and non-seasonal routes at Gatwick.

As of this very monent (the day of the year when the demand is far the highest) there are 99 flying out of 149 in the fleet. It's usually around 70-80. With 250 routes supended for January-March it will only be less than that (and more deliveries are on their way).
The answer is crew (or an AOG).

In Jan/Feb 2020, did Wizz have a substantial number (ie more than 10) of aircraft either grounded or with very low hours utilisation per week, due to seasonal low demand for travel ? Ryanair's fleet utilisation was far from 100% at the time

I'm wondering how much of Wizz's grounded fleet is due to Covid... and how much is because leisure travel in Europe in winter just has low demand

Correction: out of 150 in the fleet (as another one was delivered by Airbus today) which will become 151 in a few days.

Have Wizz changed the seating policy? I booked cheap (extremely cheap) flights a few days back to fly out to gran Canaria tomorrow, and like always I choose the basic fare. But when I try to check in, and allow wizz to choose my seats, it forces me to have to pay for them. It seems there is no way around having to pay for them.

Surely it would not be hard to check basic facts (like the current number of aircraft) before writing such a piece.

Does Wizz Air have any competence in managing their schedule, or is it quite normal to cancel flights without notifying customers less than two months before flying?

I booked DSA-AGP-DSA a couple of days ago for 27/3 and 30/3, and I've found out today (without any call or text to myself) that they've cancelled the 30/3 and subsequent Wednesday flights.

Considering Doncaster is one of their 'new' bases, the constant chopping and changing of their schedules indicates a poorly run airline that throws darts at the wall (pertaining to destinations) and has no regard for when those darts just fall off the wall.

Lots of big announcements about adding new routes and expanding rapidly whilst quietly slicing away at existing bookings/routes with no regards to their passengers.

Considering the well publicised negative treatment they give their pilots, the fact they hold their customers with such contempt is very telling.

Perhaps a bit of market research regarding route viability before entering into contracts with passengers wouldn't go amiss.

I'm no expert but they can do what they want up to 14 days before departure.
TUI recently have been cancelling flights just days before so you have been lucky!
Not enough bums on seats mean running at loss = probably canx.

Yeah, the evergreen phrase about "cash positive flying". How come they managed to make a loss of 200 odd million Euros in the last quarter then?

Wizz have snuck four more LGW routes in to Bourgas, Varna, Palermo and Venice, whilst increasing frequencies on Milan, Larnaca and Vienna.

More capacity dumping on already served routes whilst missing glaringly obvious unserved markets like Warsaw, as well as dumping Gdansk and Cluj which had 80%+ load factors pre-pandemic. I wonder how much cash they have to burn in this pursuit of market share and brand recognition.

Is demand for flying strong enough in Warsaw to be worth adding a few aircraft to Poland ?
Would UK airline employees criticise if Wizz dumped capacity on leisure routes from France or Germany ?
I don't know the Polish market that well... but it's clear that in the second half of last year, Wizz significantly overexpanded - perhaps sending aircraft to Ciudad Real or Teruel might have been a better choice

They live on forward bookings (and transforming that money to "credits" with constant schedule changes). It will only continue as they announced recently that they plan the summer season with 170 aircraft (vs the current 150). The winter schedule (until the end of March) was butchered back in December - omicron is used as an excuse while it was barely a theoretic thing on 05DEC when they did it - but I quess the summer schedule will get the chop sooner or later, it's just a question of time.
I think vokes meant the LGW-WAW/GDN flights.

Probably cheaper and less hassle for them to announce a route and see how it performs booking wise. If it's a poor performer than just can it! Not great for the paying passenger but I guess that's the way these large loco carriers work these days....

This seems to be the case, what I dont understand is why they don't just bin off some bases or routes, such as Doncaster - most of the routes will have been put back almost two years before they operate. Whats the point?

Yeah I just meant a route from Gatwick. Aside from being the most populous city in Poland, Warsaw is the gateway for anybody traveling as far West as Lodz (3rd most populous city, but close to zero connectivity), more or less the whole of the country to the East of Warsaw, including Bialystok (no airport) and as far South as Lublin. Plus everywhere in between. Put simply, almost half of Poland uses Warsaw as their main entry point.

Given the large Polish population south of the Thames and the hassle (and expense) of getting to Stansted or Luton, it's a gaping hole in Gatwick's route network. It's been operated by Norwegian and easyJet in the past, but WAW has very high fees and Polish flights generate very little auxiliary revenue, so even though load factors were good, there was always more money to be made elsewhere for them. But Wizz have three daily flights (pre-Covid) into Luton, even just moving one of those to Gatwick would capture a huge market.

But instead they'd rather dump cheap capacity into routes competing with easyJet in an attempt to capture market share and take passengers away from them. It's what they've been doing in Luton for the last five years or so, and it's what they're going to try to do in Gatwick now too. Their take over bid unmasked their intentions, but given that more or less everything Wizz has touched since they ventured out of their core East Europe market has been a catastrophic failure, one wonders how long the magic money tree will last.

2 more aircraft and 8 in total for Tirana and Kukes as a new airport for Wizz
https://wizzair.com/en-gb/informatio...hts-from-kukes

Kukes airport is purely a vanity project, even the local airline could not make it work because of the operational shortcomings/limitations.

Has there always been a £15 administration fee when booking per flight.

No, and I'm willing to bet it's per person, too? Is this included in the up-front price and then detailed at the pre-payment page, or is it completely separate?

One of Wizzair's habits is constantly evolving the charges and benefits for ancillary services (WizzPriority, seating etc) so that it's pretty difficult to keep track of the value of each add-on. The cancellation and refund fee is set at 60 Euro per person per sector and can only be processed by telephone through a call centre with a super-premium call rate. While this is not illegal, and is all set out in the small print, it is clearly designed to prevent most customers from bothering; a couple on a weekend break would need to have spent 240 Euro or more on their original fare to break even on a refund.

Still, £19.99 flights are a bargain, eh? :E

Yes £15 per person per flight two returns £60 then add the rest so no flight for 4.99 Euros.

What flights do you see the new administration fee charged on? I haven’t come across it yet.

Doncaster flights have them £7.50 so I must have miss calculated at two pax, but still there.

A quick sample booking from Doncaster shows the fare displayed in the flight selection the exact same as the final payment screen (assuming no additional adds ons are selected).

It is possible there is some form of administration fee in the fare breakdown but there is no attempt to add on a new fee at the very end (like EasyJet used to do).

Ukrainian airspace is substantially closed to civilian traffic. Military activity seems to be starting. Wizz has 3 A320s on the ground at Kyiv Zhuliany airport...wonder what will happen to those aircraft

Looks from FR24 they were planning on getting them out, but events obviously moved too quickly.

Plus one ín Lviv.

I have to question the mindset of Wizz when they put making money at the top of its priorities.

Making money should be high in the priority list, but those aircraft should have been based outside Ukraine, with no overnight stays in Ukraine
I'm wondering if somebody will try to get the A320 out of Lviv to maybe Rzeszow despite Ukraine's air space being closed. Yes, naughty, but missiles being fired on airports is also naughty

I don't think that fying in a war zone would make the owner of the aircraft and the insurance company very happy. There is no shortage of vintage 320 ceos in the world right now. However risking the life of the crew would be a whole different issue.

I would think aircraft destroyed by war on the ground would be an exclusion to the policy just like my car.

Wizzair continue to sell tickets on their website for flights to/from Ukraine or Russia on dates less than a week away. Fares to Ukraine are predictably very cheap.
It seems highly unlikely that flights will just resume at the same frequencies as before in just a few days time. They still have 4 A320s trapped in Kyiv and Lviv.

Why are Wizz doing this ? I know they can claim war as a get-out clause for EU261 but it still seems dishonest. By selling something they clearly won't be able to provide, they damage their credibility and appear like con-artists.