Wizz Air modified seats given out to passengers in an outrageous way

Several people have posted strange incidents on Facebook about travelling on various Wizz Air flights. Some people have been seated in seats other than the one they were originally booked for. Others have been assigned to the 36th row, even though there were only 35 rows on the plane.

Boarding pass: a torn piece of paper

In the Facebook group of Utazómajom, a Hungarian travel website, one passenger reported that after the gate opening of the Eindhoven flight was delayed, the crowd rushed to the gate at the same time. When the poster scanned her ticket (which was a random draw ticket for seat 19C), the display turned red and she was removed from the queue. The same thing happened to the next two passengers.

The person was moved to another row and handed a new “boarding pass”. This new boarding pass was actually a piece of paper that had 40C handwritten on it. This paper indicated that she would have to sit in the last seat next to the toilets. The other two passengers who were removed from the queue were also given their new seat numbers on a torn piece of paper.

Not the only unpleasant case

After the Eindhoven case, there were mass reports of similar incidents in the comment section.

One man bought tickets for row 38 for his entire family. However, when they checked in, the system moved them to row 40 without any indication. According to security regulations, they should not even have been allowed to sit in that place with 3 children.

Before take-off, the man and his one-year-old son were reseated. The airline did not even address his complaint, even though he had paid a considerable amount for the reserved seat tickets in advance. He said that he would have been satisfied with a refund, at least in Wizz points, but this did not happen.

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Seated in row 36, plane only has 35 rows

Others have had even more bizarre things happen to them. When checking in, for example, they were told that their seats had been “cancelled for technical reasons”. They were given a handwritten note saying they would be seated in row 36, but there were only 35 rows on the plane.

There were also passengers who had their 3 large legroom seats taken away at the last minute, allegedly due to a change of aircraft. Even the cabin crew could not understand why, as the same type of plane was arriving.

Wizz Air cites safety concerns

Utazómajom received the low-cost airline’s response to the cases. They say that if a particular route is operated with a different aircraft type due to a change in their operations, it may be necessary to reseat passengers for safety reasons to ensure the correct weight distribution.

In this case, the system changes the position of the passenger’s seat before boarding. However, if there is no printer at the gate to issue boarding passes (as this is usually done at the check-in desk) they can issue the changed seat to passengers on paper.

Use the Wizz app!

This of course only happens if the passenger is not using the Wizz Air app, where the system automatically updates the seats, they add. Therefore, they always advise their passengers to use the Wizz Air mobile app if they have the opportunity.

They also pointed out that if their passengers had purchased a seat with more legroom but were not able to sit in it due to a change of aircraft type, the airline will reimburse them in WIZZ credits.