Surprising Flightright results: here’s how reliable Wizz Air is

Horror stories emerged in the last few weeks about holidaymakers stuck at different airports because their planes could not take off or did not even show up. Some groups even had to wait days, even with small children or sick people, and did not receive proper help. Hungarian budget airline Wizz Air was mentioned too many times in such news, and that has consequences.

Significant delays in European airspace

We wrote about the last delayed Wizz Air plane on 3 July. The flight from Catania (Sicily) to Budapest was due to leave at 6.25 PM on 1 July but took off only on 3 July at 3.27 AM.

An Austrian air traffic controller head said Europe struggled with delays and named the Hungarian HungaroControl as a main contributor. The Hungarian company struggles with a labour shortage, so colleagues are overworked. Since Hungary is a main air traffic route, that has dire consequences for the entire continent.

Telex managed to talk to some insiders at HungaroControl, who cleared that the situation was not that simple. For example, they accused the budget airlines of leaving too little time for turnarounds. Therefore, sometimes the behaviour of a single passenger can cause serious delays and lead to a snowball effect. We wrote about the other side of the coin in THIS article.

HungaroControl headquarters. Photo: FB/HungaroControl

Hungarian Wizz Air is not among the top worst European airlines

Flightright, the leading European portal for passenger rights, measured the performance of the twenty biggest European airlines. They brought surprising news for Wizz Air.

Experts at the portal measured three categories: reliability (delays and cancellations), payment policy and customer opinion.

The overall results showed that Hungarian Wizz Air was the seventh worst airline in Europe, preceded by British Airways and Lufthansa, which was surprising for many Western European portals. Out of the five stars they could have collected, Wizz got 2.60. Ryanair is 10th on that list with 2.65. The best one was Transavia France (3.49).

Hungarian air traffic controllers Wizz Air

Photo: FB/HungaroControl

Wizz Air is a reliable airline, but passengers are dissatisfied

Concerning reliability, the delays and cancellations of the individual airlines were assessed. Interestingly, Wizz Air is not on the negative end of the list, the first four places went to Air Dolomiti, Lufthansa, British Airways and KLM. That means they are the most unreliable airlines in Europe. Wizz Air got four stars in that category, which means it is in one league with Vueling, Ryanair, easyJet and Condor.

Given customer satisfaction, Wizz Air performed the worst. The Hungarian airline collected only 1.79 stars, which means they are at the top of the negative list. The category includes how satisfied passengers are with customer service, information sharing policies, and help they get from the airlines, turizmus.com wrote. There is much space for development for the Hungarian airline in that regard.