Wizz Air is offering unlimited flights for a year: How does the deal work?

If you are lucky enough to live near Luton airport, and have a property abroad on the airline’s network, the deal could work very well for you

In the pink: Wizz Air Airbus A321 (Wizz Air)

How does the prospect of a year of unlimited flights within Europe and as far as the Maldives for a flat fare of £9 per hop sound? Well, if you’re tempted, Wizz Air has an “all you can fly” annual pass costing €599 (£500).

As you may imagine, a fair number of terms and conditions apply. In particular, the offer is a standby deal: you can only book your flight 72 hours ahead.

I have been wading through the rules and rewards so you didn’t have to.

Is the idea of unlimited standby flights new?

No. They were big in the 1990s, in the US at least. You paid around £300 to Delta or Northwest and flew around America and even Canada on a shoestring for a month.

Like the deal with Wizz Air, it was a standby ticket – but it was also completely free. You would turn up, show your ticket and step on board if there was at least one empty seat. No extra fees or taxes were charged, and many travellers used the trip as an ultra-budget way to explore America. You could show up for overnight coast-to-coast flights to save on accommodation, and during the day complimentary meals were served.

The Wizz Air “All you can fly” deal is rather different. You pay the upfront fee of €599 (£500), which works out at £42 per month.

For each flight you book online a maximum of three days ahead, and you must pay a flat fee of £9 for each flight.

Even so, once you’ve made the down payment, £9 per flight sounds an amazing deal?

Yes. The deal extends across almost all the Wizz Air network, which extends far and wide:

• North to Reykjavik in Iceland and Tromso in Norway
• East to Almaty in Kazakhstan and Samarkand in Uzbekistan
• South to Oman and the Maldives
• West to Madeira and the Canary Islands

Reaching some of those is a bit of a stretch: to get from Luton to the Maldives you will need to fly to somewhere in eastern Europe, then to Abu Dhabi and onwards to the Maldives.

Under the scheme you can take up to three flights a day – theoretically more than 1,000 in a year.

The £9 fee stays the same as long as you don’t want a pre-assigned seat, any baggage bigger than a small backpack or anything to eat or drink on board. All of those are extras.

Are seats available on every flight?

No. Even if seats are still on sale to the public there’s no guarantee you will be able to avail of the deal.

Wizz Air wants this offer to help it fill seats on flights that the airline knows it will never completely sell out, and does not want to have standby travellers in seats that could be sold for a handsome fare.

Wizz is being coy about availability, saying: “The provision of flight tickets depends on a number of internal and external factors.“These factors include, but not limited to the:

• a) number of total registered members of Wizz All you can fly
• b) number of overall passengers with booking to the given flight
• c) seat capacity of the given flight.”

Any other catches?

The big one is: most of us want to go there and back when we travel. But you can only book 72 hours ahead. So for a one-week holiday, halfway through you’d need to be searching for a seat on a flight home. The airline says: “If there is no return flight available due to seat unavailability ... you can book a flight using the regular booking process.”

The deal works better for a short weekend trip, because you should be able to book both legs with the deal.

Other issues:

• You can buy today but you’ll need to wait until 25 September for your first flight.
• If substantial disruption occurs (such as the air-traffic control meltdown last August bank holiday), seats will evaporate.
• The deal is not available for Italian domestic flights such as Milan or Venice to Sardinia or Sicily.
• If you are a no-show on three occasions, you will be barred from future flights with no refund.

In addition, forgetful travellers should be aware that the subscription will auto-renew each year until they inform Wizz otherwise.

Are you a buyer?

No one likes a cheap ticket more than I do, but I am not tempted. I typically fly around half-a-dozen times a year with Wizz. Assuming I could get on every one of those six flights with my standby pass, I would be paying £475 – a hefty £79 per trip.

The Wizz Air network overlaps substantially with other airlines – British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair. So I might be able to double the number of flights to 12. Each of that dozen would cost £44 with the airpass. That figure is pretty close to the average I pay for Ryanair.

In addition, as I subscribe to easyJet plus, I tend to use easyJet in order to avail of the extra baggage allowance and free seating option.

Overall, I prefer to maintain the flexibility to choose the optimum flight time rather than restrict myself to a single carrier.

So who would it suit?

• Frivolous flyers who have time on their hands. For those who want to explore Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, and for whom being unable to book the desired flight is not a big inconvenience, the prospect of a year in the skies may well be tempting.
• People who are lucky enough to live near Luton, Wizz Air’s main UK base, because they will swerve most of the cost of reaching the airport.
• Travellers who regularly commute on routes with relatively high frequency. Suppose you normally travel there and back twice a month. That is potentially 48 flights. With a £500 pass, that works out at barely £10 each. Add on the £9 charge for each flight, and you are still paying less than an express rail ticket from London to Luton or Gatwick. If you have two homes, then the problem of luggage will evaporate, too.

Unlimited flying must be extremely environmentally harmful?

As long as the passenger is occupying a seat that would otherwise be empty – which is Wizz Air’s firm plan – the marginal impact is the small amount of fuel burnt to fly the extra weight of the person and their baggage.

So it is less damaging than buying a ticket normally, which creates demand and informs airlines’ decisions about future flight planning. But the question for every traveller should be: is your journey really necessary?