Wizzair Sucks

Thank God for the freedom of speech and the internet! At least we can share our resentment for what is probably the worst airline on the planet!

// September 9th, 2009 // 7 Comments » // frontpage, letters

Letter from “Dan” sent to us on 09/08/2009:

Here is my story, in progress, as I am committed to do everything in my power to make it right!

To start off, I’d like to point out that this was our honeymoon flight, Cluj – Venice, to start off what should have been the beginning of our beautiful married life. I am a Platinum Star Alliance Member.

August 25th, 2009 10:30 AM: we got in a hurry at the CLJ airport, traffic and a new terminal barely visible made us get there 45 minutes before scheduled departure. Shock when we got to the check in desk, THERE WAS NO ONE THERE!!! Not a single person from WIZZ Air!!!

August 25th, 2009 10:32 AM: shocked and in disbelief, I rushed to the WIZZ ticketing counter to ask someone to get us boarding passes. Shock again, when the agent told us “tough luck”, grudgingly showing us a big sign that said that check in closes 40 min before departure. When I said there’s 43 minutes to departure and we have no luggage, he simply walked away….

August 25th, 2009 10:35 AM: frantically I called WIZZ Air Customer (or should I say lack of Customer) Service… for 60 EURO cents a minutes, I got to experience the worst customer service of my life!!! It ended in the lady agent slamming the phone in my face!!!!!! Ouch….

August 25th, 2009 10:38 AM: after paying about 3 EUROs to be abused over the phone, I realized that we might not make the flight… none of my desperate calls or my wife’s tears to the security desk, the ticketing agents or any person that seemed remotely official to call someone from WIZZ Air from the gate to give us our boarding passes had any luck…. We were being denied boarding this flight!!!!

August 25th, 2009 10:40 AM: back at the ticketing desk, I tried to see what flight accommodation they can provide us, considering that we have just been denied boarding our scheduled flight. Now comes the shock of all shocks, the mother of all surprises, when the agent told us that the next scheduled flight will be 2 days from now and we will be charged 120 EUROs for the both of us!!!! If we wanted to leave that day, there was only one option, to buy a new ticket and be re-routed through Germany. And we needed to be fast as the flight was leaving at 12:00 PM. By the way, the price for this was a whopping EUR 1,300!!!!!!!! Ouch, ouch….

My jaw dropped and I tried to explain that there are international regulations concerning denied boarding situations (didn’t knew at the time Regulation (EC) No 261/2004, but I am a frequent flyer and I know in the US all airlines are trying to accommodate passengers in their flights or code-share flights in situations like this.

August 25th, 2009 11:10 AM: we had no choice….. we paid the EUR 1,300 and got on board Lufthansa flight to Venice through Munich. Star Alliance partner Lufthansa had no issue checking us in 45 minutes before departure…..

So now, I’m left fighting WIZZ Air for some retribution for this “unpleasant situation” as they referred to it in their reply to my claim request. I’m planning on cancelling the credit card payment for the tickets, that covers about $250 and trying to recoup the rest through Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 either by suing them in small claims court in the US or reaching out to the Romanian authorities. If anyone has any experience as to what the best way would be to reach any civil authorities in Romania or Europe that would have a saying in this, please reply to my message.

Thanks for this website and I hope some of these stories and hopefully resolutions to issues presented here will help people be more informed before being trapped and screwed by WIZZ Air.

Dan

Wizzair No Show

// April 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // letters

We showed up and waited, and waited and waited, …..

Finally some baggage people were going for coffee and they said “Neema” (means no more, not going to happen, not today, not ….)

So no plane, no phone call in advance saying no plane, no e-mail saying no plane and no hand written sign saying, sorry folks, you’re out of luck. Any of which would have saved us and others at least an hour and a half.

Some people left to go get a train but the direct train had left while we waiting for the flight. (How rude on WizzAirs part!)

This is really, really tacky. Really bad service. If they have to cancel they could at least post a hand written sign or e-mail to say the flight is to be cancelled.

In the discussions that followed no one would say why there wasn’t a flight, just that there wasn’t one.

Some of the people there had driven fours hours to get to the airport on time. (We had driven about an hour and a half.)

Two thumbs down for WizzAir.

….. SC

reposted from http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/other-european-frequent-flyer-programs/944693-whats-up-wizzair-2.html

Newest Wizzair Stranded Customer

// April 27th, 2009 // 7 Comments » // 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.

Wizzair random gripe

// April 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // letters

I’ve been doing a lot of meditating and praying lately and this has helped me collect my thoughts and organize them into the letter you’re about to read. Please note that many of the conclusions I’m about to draw are based on cogent and virtually incontrovertible evidence provided by a set of people who have suffered immensely on account of Wizzair. For the record, unlike Wizzair, when I make a mistake I’m willing to admit it. Consequently, if—and I’m bending over backwards to maintain the illusion of “innocent until proven guilty”—it were not actually responsible for trying to legitimize the fear and hatred of the privileged for the oppressed, then I’d stop saying that there is indisputably no limit to Wizzair’s impudence. From this anecdotal evidence I would argue that a plan of rational reaction to its primitive Ponzi schemes is indubitably in order. But the problems with its tracts don’t end there. Is Wizzair’s head really buried too deep in the sand to know that the doom-and-gloom, it’s-too-late crowd always plays right into its hands? Well, while you’re deliberating over that, let me ask you another question: How long shall there continue virulent gasbags to vend and destructive nonentities to gulp so low a piece of unilateralism as its sound bites? Now, not to bombard you with too many questions, but it has a vested interest in maintaining the myths that keep its coalition loyal to it. Wizzair’s principal myth is that it acts in the name of equality and social justice. The truth is that Wizzair’s faithfuls argue that it possesses infinite wisdom. These are the same self-righteous, gutless stool pigeons who slow scientific progress. This is no coincidence; when Wizzair was first found trying to malign and traduce me, I was scared. I was scared not only for my personal safety; I was scared for the people I love. And now that Wizzair is planning to bury our heritage, our traditions, and our culture, I’m terrified.

I would be grateful if Wizzair would take a little time from its rigorous schedule to place blame where it belongs—in the hands of Wizzair and its querulous collaborators. Of course, pigs will grow wings and fly before that ever happens. Wizzair should pay a price for its nefarious expositions. Let me try to explain what I mean by that in a single sentence: The biggest difference between me and Wizzair is that Wizzair wants to leach integrity and honor from our souls. I, on the other hand, want to defend with dedication and ferocity the very rights that it so desperately wants to abolish. Wizzair’s doctrines all stem from one, simple, faulty premise—that an open party with unlimited access to alcohol can’t possibly outgrow the host’s ability to manage the crowd.

I don’t get it: Which of the seven deadly sins—pride, envy, anger, sadness, avarice, gluttony, and lust—does Wizzair not commit on a daily basis? I mean, we could opt to sit back and let Wizzair sanctify its depravity. Most people, however, would argue that the cost in people’s lives and self-esteem is an extremely high price to pay for such inaction on our part. Now, lest you jump to the conclusion that we’re supposed to shut up and smile when Wizzair says vicious things, I assure you that its behavior might be different if it were told that the final product of its suggestions will be a dysfunctional society, wherein every natural self-defense mechanism has been short-circuited in some gloomy effort to gain short-term financial benefits. Of course, as far as Wizzair’s concerned, this fact will fall into the category of, “My mind is made up; don’t confuse me with the facts.” That’s why I’m telling you that it maliciously defames and damagingly misrepresents everyone and everything around it. There’s a word for that: libel. Now that this letter is over, I, speaking as someone who is not a tyrannical blowhard, pray that my logic and passion have convinced you that Wizzair’s behavior is absolutely out of line.