Reader’s letter: An urgent call to regulators to stop Wizz Air’s unacceptable behavior immediately

Our reader Hani Ghantus from Israel is encouraging you to think twice before flying with the Hungarian low-cost airline Wizz Air. “Flying with Wizzair? Think twice as you can easily get duped,” he writes in his letter. Find his words below.

Hereby, I will reveal why I think Wizz Air is operating unethically and suspiciously which requires an immediate investigations by regulators to protect customer’s rights.

After reading so many incidents and personal experiences on the internet, I started to believe that Wizz Air is using the technique of “attrition” whereby passengers will give up eventually their repeated attempts to acquire their obvious rights. Wizz Air is allegedly counting on people with no legal backgrounds and all for one clear purpose, trying to evade their legal liabilities as much as possible by paying as little as possible in exchange of taking away people’s legitimate rights. Why do I think like this? if you bear with me till the end, after sharing my own story, I will expose and reveal shocking findings.

What I discovered, the UK authorities had discovered and raised high concerns over Wizz Air and used the words “Unacceptable behavior” to describe Wizz Air’s ways dealing with the customers complaints. You can check it yourself in the official UK civil aviation authority website HERE.

When planning a trip, we tend to search for the cheapest flights available without taking into considerations the potential consequences caused by choosing a specific airline over others and that was my case.

For the past few years, I’ve been flying with Wizz Air frequently, a couple of times there were some delays but nothing remarkable that would have made me want to avoid Wizz Air or question their business.

Last December, Wizz Air’s image changed drastically. It was our first serious flight disruption which led to shocking findings.

Me and my fiancée had a flight from Warsaw taking us to Brussels where we were supposed to spend a whole day discovering Brussels before heading to Amsterdam where we already had a hotel booked and fully charged.

Around 30 hours before the flight, we got an email from Wizz Air informing us that our flight was cancelled. We rushed to call their incompetent call center, we explained that we have a long Christmas trip planned long time ago which was fully paid, a few countries to discover, hotels and car rentals which also were paid.

We asked Wizz Air to give us any alternative solution to avoid losing the money and the planned vacation. The agent didn’t have much to say and somehow he decided to lie to us (we do have recording proving that) by informing us that the flight was not cancelled, he added that it was just an error in the system that we should ignore and ordinarily show up in the airport for check-in as planned.

Retrospectively, we found out that it was just an unexplainable and inhumane response. He just wanted to get rid of our problem by providing false info without caring about the potential damages that we could encounter. He didn’t even care that the flight was around 6 AM, we would wake up so early, show up in the airport to find out that the flight is cancelled. It would be very unpleasant to say the least.

After we hung up the phone, we felt he was not providing us with accurate informations so we found out later that he did lie to avoid the issue we were having. The flight was indeed cancelled and Wizz Air didn’t care to give us any alternative options to get to our destination on time. So, what we decided to do after searching the available options was to let go of the chance of exploring Brussels and rebooked a flight to Eindhoven instead so we could take a bus to Amsterdam later on, it was free of charge to rebook.

Even though we knew we would arrive around 6 hours later than the schedule arrival time, at least this decision will cost us minor losses such as 35 euros approximately of prepaid bus tickets that were supposed to take us from Brussels to Amsterdam in the evening, besides the change of plans and adding some additional money for transportations to get us to Amsterdam at night.

On the day of our new flight, we got another email informing us that the flight was delayed by 2 hours, later on, next to the boarding gate we were told that also this flight was cancelled. There was literally no solution offered and no one to talk with in the airport. Wizz Air call center could not provide any meaningful answer, they are not entitled to give an immediate help but to refer you to fill a form and wait few weeks for the answer, meanwhile you have to deal with your issue on your own. There were no Wizz Air flights to Eindhoven nor Brussels in the same day neither the next day and Wizzair doesn’t fly to Amsterdam anyway so we could not use any of Wizz Air’s flights.

We were left with no choice but to go to the website of Skyscanner and search for any alternative flight with a different airline to take us to the Netherlands as it was already getting late (after 2 pm). We already got charged for the hotel stay and the next flight from the Netherlands was 3 days from that day. So, we found 3 alternative flights which can take us to the Netherlands, we chose the cheapest available option which cost 275.8 USD per person (we were a couple as mentioned), we booked the cheapest flight available even though it was the latest flight out of the three options and the least convenient as we had long hours to waste in the airport. At the end, we arrived to the hotel in Amsterdam the next day (after midnight), arriving approximately 15 hours later than the original flight arrival time.

So after carefully reading our legal rights and understanding them clearly, we filed a claim using Wizz Air’s website to get back the money that we had to pay as a result of the cancellations. And here, the struggle started.

The process of the claim to get our additional expenses refunded was long, frustrating and even humiliating. Wizz Air is taking forever to answer the claims, you should expect long weeks to get answers from them. Wizz Air initially agreed to pay back our alternative flight expenses. However, after we sent them the bank details to proceed with the payment, they suddenly decided that instead of refunding 275 USD, they will refund only 150 euros with no explanation or justification to their decision even though all invoices were attached including credit card statement showing the exact transactions amounts.

Wizz Air did not ask us if we agree to the modified offer. However, when I got the email from them informing me that they changed their decision and would refund only 150 euros per person, I explicitly demanded not to proceed with the transaction. For me, it turned to a battle of principle rather than just a small amount of money. I stated clearly: I either get to vindicate all my rights or nothing. They sent part of the money at the end without my consent.

I’ve tried to explain so many times to Wizz Air why the full refunds are due. We behaved in good faith and did not try to exploit the situation by choosing the most convenient flight available even though it could have saved us so much time. Instead, we went with the cheapest option available. We were asking for reasonable amounts to refund as follows: