200 thousand Wizz Air passengers can receive compensation

The Hungary-based low-cost airline would spend 250 million HUF (almost 800 thousand EUR) for compensating those passengers who used their Wizz Flex service, after they managed to finish negotiations with the Hungarian Competition Authority (GVH). 

According to hvg.hu, GVH received many complaints in connection with their Wizz Flex service, which enables passengers to modify their ticket without a flight change fee. However, the investigation of the Hungarian authority found some details in the regulation of the service that, in practice, reduced the number of free flight changes significantly. 

For example,

• with regards to bookings concerning flight tickets for outbound and return journeys, it was not possible for customers to re-route their return journeys once their journeys had commenced; moreover, after embarking on their journeys, customers could only jointly change their outbound and return journeys;
• when accessing the Wizz Flex service feature on the internet, it was not possible to individually change the flight tickets of passengers that had been purchased under one booking, meaning that all passengers’ tickets had to be changed simultaneously;
• if the customer wanted to change his/her flight, the price offered to the customer was the same as the price that he/she had originally paid, even if the price of a ticket bought for the same journey without modification would actually be cheaper. Consequently, in the case of re-routing within the Wizz Flex system, the customer was unable to benefit from a favourable difference between the price of the original ticket and the new ticket;
• in the case of flight changes requested by customers between January and September 2016, passengers had to pay not only the difference between the flight tickets but also the dynamically changing differences relating to baggage fees.

According to the authorities, over the course of the competition supervision proceedings, Wizz Air offered a number of commitments. Pursuant to the commitments, Wizz Air undertook to credit a lump sum compensation to each customer who had used the Wizz Flex service since 2010, and