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.