budget airlines

Wizz Air A320 HA-LYD at Luton Airport

I recently travelled from London-Luton airport in the UK to Skopje in Macedonia. Skopje is a destination that few airlines service directly from the UK. The one exception to this is Wizz airlines, a Hungarian budget airline that offers the EGGW-LWSK route 5 times a week.

So I booked an outgoing flight for early September, with a return flight in mid-October. Easy, yes?

No! Tickets can only be purchased on-line. There is no option to email the company should you have a problem with the booking. So of course I had a problem. The web based system would not accept my credit card details. The only option I had was to do an international electronic funds transfer, which I duly arranged. A week later my travel details had NOT be confirmed. I found that I could contact the company’s call centre in London at the princely sum of GBP1 per minute. I was told the original booking had been cancelled, and thatI would have to rebook. Yes, the IEFT would be applied to second booking, by linking the original booking number with the secondary booking number. After rebooking I needed to contact the call centre agaian to again recheck why the booking was still not confirmed. I managed to confirm the booking with this call, and received electronic verification; but I was asked to pay another GBP20. OK, I thought, I can put up with that.

Then there was the on-line check-in that must be completed prior to arrival at the airport, or pay an additional fee at the airport. But hang on a minute, my wife who is a non-EU passport holder would need to check in at the airport to have her passport checked! Let me think about this a minute! We have to check-in pre-paid baggage at the check-in desk. So we need to check in on-line to avoid a fee, but still need to check-in at the desk for a non-EU traveller and check in baggage. Go figure! Oh, did I mention that there is a fee for carrying a “large” cabin bag. I always thought a cabin bag was made to set dimensions, not so it seems to Wizz.

Then there was the flight! Flight Number W67702 (A320 HA-LYD c/n 6115) on 2014-09-10 left Luton-London at 08:34, 19 minutes behind schedule. An hour into the flight the PIC (Pilot-In-Command) is seen for an extended period fraternising with cabin crew in the passenger cabin of the aircraft whilst drinking coffee. Who is flying the aircraft? The door to the flight deck is also left open for a considerable amount of time. An hour out of Skopje, two members of the cabin crew dissappear onto the flight deck, with the female member of the crew remaining there for 20 minutes or more! Why so?

In my opinion, the behaviour of the flight and cabin crews demonstrated a distinct lack of protocol, safety and security in the way this flight was conducted. I left with no option than to believe that the airline condones this sort of in-flight behaviour of it’s flight/cabin crews!

I suppose the final insult was that the touch down in Skopje was so poor, with the aircraft bouncing so heavily, I was forced to consider whether we had landed or indeed had we been shot down!

All in all, in my opinion, Wizz delivered a very dismal performance in terms of in-flight safety and security with basic in-flight protocols being ignored. There was open access to the flight deck for a considerable time.

Wizz clearly offer flights made down to a price, NOT up to a standard.

For further reviews on Wizz Air’s performance as a budget airline, go to http://www.airlinequality.com/Forum/wizz.htm.

If the latest information on Jetstar NZ is true, full service carriers might start sending teams from all over the world to study and if possible replicate the benefits that the Qantas budget subsidiary is unintentionally delivering for Air New Zealand.

Consider the fundamentals behind this story:

Jetstar NZ can’t give its seats away at around $NZ 100 for a short one way flight, leaving Air NZ to charge up to $340 for the same trip.
Yet on the face of it, New Zealand, comprising two islands, and one mobile and prosperous society, could not have been better set up to suit the advent of high frequency short distance low cost flying.

It is the last place on earth that a full service carrier could successfully compete with a low fare carrier, especially where some fares may be three times as high on the former as on the latter.

It is the last place where a low cost carrier could fail. But while we can’t measure the monetary extent to which Jetstar NZ is a failure, its Head of New Zealand, Grant Kerr, says in the interview that at best on some major routes he has only 24 per cent of the market.

What this means is that Jetstar NZ has mopped up the lowest paying quarter of the passenger uplift on those routes, thus lifting the average fare being collected by Air NZ for the other three quarters of sector in terms of head count.

Air NZ has every reason to be grateful to Qantas for the manner in which it is conducting its business in New Zealand, a golden windfall which it must wish will continue indefinitely.

The article suggests that unpunctuality is the major reason business travelers avoid the huge savings to be made flying Jetstar NZ. The incident in which a check in clerk jumped the counter to punch out a passenger, a radio station shock jock, in 2010 seems to have faded with time.

However the real lesson from Jetstar NZ’s admitted lack of traction with higher yielding passengers may be that the unintended value of low cost competitors is to lift average yields for those carriers that have developed a strong brand following among customers who will not shift their support just because of price.

If this lesson is applicable in Australia it means that over time Qantas and Virgin Australia would be better off letting someone else compete in the low fare domestic market rather than their self owned or controlled budget brands of Jetstar and Tigerair respectively, and deal with that external competition from the position of strength that comes from keeping the higher paying customers for themselves.

At the moment in NZ, everything Jetstar does can be seen as directly benefiting Air New Zealand.