Wizz Air: Another Unpleasant Experience

It happened to me again. Another unpleasant experience with Wizz Air. You can read my first adventure with them here and my opinion about the website wizzair.com, which is an important part of Wizz Air service, here. This time there were not large queues of passengers at the airport, still one of the flights was late due to accumulated delay. The leg room was again very insufficient but nothing unexpected in this department either. In addition, they made us to replace our home-printed web check-in papers with new boarding passes at one of the airports, which made the home-printed passes pretty much unnecessary. Yet, people will continue to print expendable paper at home until Wizz Air is charging an airport check-in fee if you have not preliminary made a web check-in. But all of these were not a surprise.

The thing that really annoyed me was that they broke my suitcase. I suppose, it happens sometimes. But in the case of Wizz Air it's more irritating cause you have to pay for your check-in luggage. This is the reason why almost everybody travels with just hand baggage on Wizz Air flights and this leads to additional discomfort for all of the passengers since there is not enough space for everyone's hand luggage in the cabin of the plane. Everyone carries a big piece of cabin luggage (up to the allowed limits and sometimes even exceeding them) which actually results in even more uncomfortable trip because many passengers have to put their "real" hand luggage below their seats.

Another related problem partially due to the above one is that you have to compete for earlier boarding on the plane because first, you have to be ahead of the others if you want to put your baggage in the designated compartments and second if you are not flying alone chances are you will seat separated from your fellow-travellers if you've not been fast enough to leave behind the majority of "competitors". I don't know why Wizz Air do not assign seats at the time of check-in, especially when you are forced to check-in twice actually. This "first-come, first-served" principle seems a little bit inappropriate for an airline company. After all, assigning seats is a far easier task than transporting passengers.

Now, to return on the broken trunk. I wouldn't be so annoyed if there were not 2 particular reasons. First, most of the passengers do not pay the additional tax for baggage so Wizz Air flights practically have almost nothing to handle in this aspect. I would expect that a large company as they are pretending to be should know how to handle just a few suitcases. They should have enough time to handle them carefully because of their small number. And second, I had paid for my luggage explicitly. It had not been just a free supplement to my ticket but a separate service I had paid for. If they cannot handle my luggage properly, they should not charge me for such a service.

Finally, when I arrived at the airport and I saw my trunk had been broken, I asked the corresponding clerk should I file a complaint against Wizz Air. The answer was, "you will just lose your time and most likely receive nothing". I wouldn't usually agree easily to not take any action but in this case, I did. Having all of my previous experience with Wizz Air in mind, I thought the guy was probably right: Wizz Air don't care too much for the services they offer, neither for your opinion.

You may ask, why did I use them for a second time. Well, they are obviously cheaper, especially if you catch the right time to book. And what is not less important there are itineraries that are not covered with direct flights by any other airline company so you do not have much of a choice anyway if you don't want to change several planes before you reach your destination.

Wizz Air and flibco.com Follow-Up: The Actual Experience

Let's follow up my unfavourable reviews of WizzAir.com and flibco.com websites with the actual experience both services offer. If you haven't read those reviews and you are not familiar with these companies, note that Wizz Air is a low cost airline company and flibco.com offers a shuttle bus service. Both of them operate in Europe.

Wizz Air (wizzair.com)

In addition to not having a user-friendly site, Wizz Air has also some room for improvements concerning their actual service. Contrary to many other big airline companies which advise you to arrive at the airport at least 2 hours in advance of your flight, Wizz Air want you to be at the airport just 40 minutes before the departure time of a particular flight. But when you arrive at the airport even much earlier than the aforementioned 40 minutes, you are unpleasantly surprised by the large queue of passengers waiting in front of the check-in desk and you become even more sick after seeing the enormous line of people waiting for security check. The reason appears to be that there are several Wizz Air flights in a short span of 10 minutes but nevertheless this does not comfort you at all.

When you finally pass through the check-in desk (after you've been waiting for nothing more than just leaving your luggage there), if you ask Wizz Air's employees how do they expect that all those people waiting for security check will manage to board their plane on time, the answer you receive is "once you're here, we will wait for you to board". Well, at least we won't miss our flight but the result is that at the announced departure time, the passengers have not reached further than the boarding gate. I suppose this happens every time so it is strange why Wizz Air do not change something.

Independently of the late departure, the pilots managed to overtake the delay and the plane arrived on time. I do not know if this is actually good or bad from a safety perspective if it is at expense of a higher than recommended speed. And while speaking of the pilots, the plane took off very smoothly and also the landing was Ok. Yes, there was something good at last. Another not so pleasant experience was the very short legroom on the plane but it was expected. And finally, not something mandatorily bad but somehow strange was that we had to walk from the boarding gate to the plane and vice versa at two of the airports. It was a new experience for me.

flibco.com

Concerning flibco.com shuttle bus service there were not any unpleasant surprises. The buses arrived on time and reached their destinations promptly. The seats were comfortable (much more comfortable than the seats on the Wizz Air planes) and adjustable. Online reservations worked just fine and driving was safe. Frankly speaking, flibco.com bus service was really good and offering a much better journey than the one you would expect after using their website.

To recapitulate: While flibco.com shuttle service is far better than their site and there is nothing to be desired from their buses and drivers, Wizz Air have to make improvements not only concerning their web site but also in regard to their actual airline services. The flights seem safe and this is definitely the most important thing when speaking of airline carriers but there are other things that could be easily made better and that would offer Wizz Air's passengers a more pleasant and satisfying experience.

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Wizz Air: A Low Cost Airline Company with a Terrible Site

Several days ago, I had to make flight reservations at WizzAir.com for a couple of flights in Europe. While I haven't made myself sure yet that Wizz Air airline service is also a low quality one in addition to being low cost, I can definitely say that Wizz Air's website is terrible and very user unfriendly.

I have always wondered how it regularly happens that big companies with a considerable amount of constant expenses cannot manage to put aside some resources once in order to create a decent web site. It's even more shocking when talking about companies whose business is very closely related with the Internet. Apparently, Wizz Air's website offers one of those nasty web experiences and frankly speaking, in result of that "user friendliness", I'm quite concerned about the quality of their airline service too.

To start with, there is not a shopping cart at Wizz Air website (so you are not able to make more than one reservation at a time). If you want to buy tickets for several flights, you have to go through the whole process again and again. Of course, if some kind of error happens (and errors do happen often at WizzAir.com) you'll have to make even more iterations entering your details. It's not the world's end but it's really boring when you do the same thing several times in a row.

The next surprise coming from Wizz Air is that entering your address is mandatorily. But the surprise is even bigger because the address field is so short, you practically cannot enter even a middle-length address. Of course, this makes the requirement for entering your address redundant and mostly annoying because you have to enter something anyway though it is not your actual address.

Now, another weird event follows at WizzAir.com. You make a reservation for a flight and the prices are shown automatically in a particular currency (probably the one that is somehow considered to be best for you). Then you make a reservation for another flight and oddly enough the currency is automatically changed to another one. In both cases if you decide to choose another currency some unpleasant exchange rate is applied so you unwillingly prefer to keep the automatically proposed one in either case.

Certainly, the above has not been all the charm you can get from Wizz Air's website. Since Wizz Air is a low cost airline company you are charged separately for almost anything that may come to your mind. There are baggage fees, extra legroom seat fees, credit card booking fees, etc. One of the possible fees is for a check-in at the airport. But you have the option to make the check-in online for free at WizzAir.com. Why not, one could think? Well, if you have a big bag you should go to the check-in counter at the airport in order to deposit it so the web check-in is again a kind of redundant option in many of the cases but anyway...

Let's make an online check-in. You have to enter your Wizz Air flight confirmation code and some additional information and then a couple of forms appear which you must fill in. After doing so you hopefully press the confirmation button but (not so) surprisingly you receive a connection error with a message that probably the lines are overloaded. Naturally, all of your information is lost and you have to enter it again. Well, you make a second attempt and this time you get another error: pnrParseError. At least, one cannot complain of error diversity at Wizz Air's website.

Well, I understand that Wizz Air is a low cost company and they offer cheap services but I don't think it will cost them a fortune to implement a user friendly and working site. After all, if they rely on the size of their customer base, having a crappy website is not the best way to attract returning customers. And it is definitely not a good recommendation for a company in a risky business like airline carriers. How a passenger could expect safe flying after going through such a nasty online experience?

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