Newest Wizzair Stranded Customer
// April 27th, 2009 // letters
During our recent trip to Europe we used your airline almost exclusively over 3 weeks. We booked 4 flights through Wizz air to visit Italy, Romania, Germany and finally Ukraine. All of our flights were reasonably priced and easy to book and when we made the first three flights we found the service excellent.
However on March 21st 2009, we had a booked two different flights with Wizzair. Flight W6 705 from TSR to Dortmund and Flight WU 986 from Dortmund to Lviv. There were 4 of us, my parents my girlfriend, and myself. On March 19th I received an email stating our flight had been moved from Timisoara to Arat. After arranging a fairly expensive taxi to take us to Arat, we did eventually make our flight and arrive in Dortmund on time or close enough to it. We should have been more than able to make our connecting flight to Lviv.
In Dortmund we were hoping that our travel problems would be over after the 200km+ journey to Arat. We had plenty of time to check in so we took up our travel problem with the ticket agent while we were checking in for our next flight. Mostly we wanted to drop our note into a suggestion box and be done with it, but this is where it went wrong. A moment before bringing up our Arat complaint we were checking in quite normally, and after she seemed irritated and seemingly busy although there was hardly anyone around but us. She announced two of our bags were suddenly too big. A moment before she said nothing of it, our boarding passes were in her hand. These were carry-on backpacks that we had just brought with us from the first leg of the flight with no problem. Our carry-ons were medium size backpacks, a bit chunky but easy enough to fit in the overhead bins with several inches of clearance. Additionally we had taken those same backpacks on all three previous flights all with Wizz Air within the last seven days. We took our flight from Arat to Dortmund flight only hours before with those same bags in the overhead bins without issue. We explained this to her… three Wizz Air flights behind us in the last week none of our luggage had been a problem on any of our Wizz Air flights.
This didn’t faze her, so to try to prove it to us… she had me weigh my mother’s bag on the scale. She immediately changed the subject pointing out some other flaw, obviously not happy with the bags weight, so I pressed asking if the bag was indeed too heavy. She told me “Well…. NO, but it’s still too big.” She then had me try to fit it in the carry-on test fit thing and eureka, it fit! We pressed our case again mentioning our lack of a problem on not one but three previous flights. We explained we had had no difficulty with our bags coming from Romania or the Czech Republic and she told us “This is Germany, not Eastern Europe…”. My mother brought up that the bags had also worked in Italy days before too. Frustrated, the agent told us it was out of her control and stated that “in Germany rules are simply not as lax” seemingly to imply there are lesser parts of Europe. We were told we must talk to the baggage desk across the room from her.
We followed her advice and spoke a man at the baggage desk who was very polite. He didn’t seem to know what it was all about until he made a phone call. He told us that two of our bags were too big… but when we showed them to him, he didn’t know which ones! He tried to be helpful and after we convinced him they weren’t too big and we had just gotten off another Wizz Air flight he again made another call… again he said some of the backpacks were too big. After another round of convincing he made a third call, this time very long and as we waited we realized looking behind us the person he was calling was the ticketing agent who had referred us to him.
She had gotten rid of us by sending us to a subordinate whose only recourse was to call her. We persisted and he seemed genuinely convinced that our bags were indeed the same as many other people’s carry-on baggage who were now lining up, but that he had no authority on the matter other than to sell us luggage tickets to check our bags. After carting our bags around Romania because of the last minute airport change and finding our own way some 200km to a make-shift airport we were not in the mood to pay further fees to your airline. He told us he could do nothing; we either had to pay another fee or find another way to our destination. We were refused boarding of the plane by the ticket agent. Instead we took a long and expensive $150 x 4 train to our destination.
The purpose of this letter is to request a refund for both of the flights we booked on the 21st. Changing airports two days before departure and not providing transportation from the booked airport to the new one is unacceptable. I realize your conditions may have been unavoidable, but you could have made the circumstances for your customers better. Your customer service, at least in Dortmund, Germany, is appalling and the experience dehumanizing. We were treated indifferently and our problems were met without the least bit of caring or common sense. We want our money returned for both flights at a minimum and if you care about image of your company I suggest an apology and adjusted compensation for our train fare to our final destination.
7 Responses to “Newest Wizzair Stranded Customer”
Leave a Reply to Damian Galvin
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- xxx said: Listen. Did wizzair staff checked your bag, did wi...
Wow… i’ve had some crappy experiences but man, that sucks!
You don’t want to pay money, and you nag when things go wrong. I fly Wizz Air 2 times a month, and i find them to be very reliable. Flights on time, mostly ahead of schedule. Clean planes. Professional crew.
So chill, don’t rule on things based on single events. Such things happen with every airline.
Yes, well… other airlines, even easy jet will help provide you a means of getting home, or at the very least a refund and the pretense of caring what happens to you. No one ever said anything negative about the Wizzair crew or anything except the customer service. Please read the About us, or FAQ page before making pernicious or erroneous statements.
Wow, I didn’t have to moderate this comment. Unfortunately we do not have a FAQ page but its a good idea. Everything else stated by “Johnson” is correct. This site is not about Wizzair’s fine crew or flight staff, its planes, or being on time. The only problem with Wizzair is their Customer Service or lack thereof. Letters sent to Wizzair never get a response. Let me know if anyone else has gotten a response which was not wholly automated or has even heard of such a thing occurring. As far as this site is concerned, Wizzair has no customer service. I challenge anyone to prove otherwise.
I still fly Wizzair because there is simply no alternative for my route, but I would prefer ryanair over them… and that says a lot.
I don’t think Wizzair has anything to do with the fact that you failed to board at DTM. That was the local German staff who didn’t like your baggage and I have the same bad experience that they take regulations the most strictly in Europe. You could have saved a lot of money and time by not acting like a hero and pay that extra 30 EUR (or I assume something similar), you could probably get that refunded through customer service but definetely not your train tickets and the flight you actually used. By the way the change of airport is not an uncommon thing, it is mentioned in t&c and you have the right to get your ticket refunded if unhappy with the change, not very nice that you’ve been informed 2 days before departure however. (unless their website had the information much earlier but you weren’t aware of)
Marion, no offense but your email is a crock of bs. You either work for the airline or don’t get out much. Firstly, it costs 1 euro per minute to call them & they deliberately stall you to at least 15 mins. Secondly, it is always always not in your interest financially to do anything at all with any tickets, It is almost always just as cheap to throw the ticket away than to adjust it. I just tried 3 mins ago to move an Xmas flight in 23 days to a month later & the change-cost was 70gbp, but a completely new ticket cost 71gbp! I would not mind but the original ticket cost me 125gbp for that leg, & wizz render it useless but charging me basically a full replacement cost for a new date,
So far I have flown wizzair 33 time, with 12 more flights booked up for the next 4 months & I can promise you, it is not possible to get any sense out of them at all. If you call them, you pay, if you email, you get dummy replies.
I had a flight from Cluj to London & London to Cluj in March. Paid, done dusted. 4 weeks later, a week before the flight, I received a confirmation email. 10 mins later, a conflicting email to say the London return flight returned to another airport 1 hour away, T Mures. I ignores the mail as a phishing email looking for me to log in. Every 2 days, I received both emails again. One confirming all was as orig plannned & another right behind it saying I had to log in & confirm a change. 4 times this happened in the week upto the flight. so I went to cluj at the outbound time & they could not tell me. So I flew to London & there I discovered the move was genuine, so I returned to a diff airport & hada 1 hour, 50 euro taxi to get back to Cluj, to my car. It has taken preceisely 8 months & 44 emails for Wizz to accept that they changed AFTER my booking was made (41 emails said it was obviously stated at the time of booking & that I must have accepted that condition, until I asked for proof of date change, which showed 30 clear days between my booking & their venue change!) Now, they’ve offered me 100 ron as an apology, but I only ever wanted an apology saying yes, we changed teh venue after you booked & yes, we send conflicting emails contradicting each other.
So please, don’t tell people its all very simple & they should have done this or that. You try it first & come tell us how pleasant & expensive it was. Not everyone wants to take hold luggage, for speed, so how can it be ok for wizz staff at all those airports & not ok in Germany!!! They train at the same training school, use the same size gauges & load the same planes. If its ok in Italy, its ok in Germany! Simple. So, your useful suggestion to those guys is not so useful!
The positive comments supporting wizz are a bit suspicious to me. Wizz is a very polished airline if things go well, but as soon as they go wrong, the CS is crap, & very expensive. & to the guy who says he flies 2x per month, big deal, me too. 8 actually if you count a return as 2 journeys. Other airlines are not the same, no even close. Wizz gives crap exchange rates on currency spent on board, have expensive customer service & your tciket change costs that render the original one valueless. I just hope you guys get to share some of these experiences