Hey you with the pretty face
Welcome to the human race
A celebration, mister blue sky’s up there waiting
And today is the day we’ve waited for

Mister blue sky please tell us why
You had to hide away for so long (so long)
Where did we go wrong?

Electric Light Orchestra, “Mr. Blue Sky“

Today WIZZ All You Can Fly starts! So how should we plan our trips?

The first round of planning – Wanderlust occupied our minds, so we took our computer out on the terrace and scanned the Wizz Air destinations.

First step: direct flights from Vienna

From the 30+ destinations Wizz Air currently flies from Vienna, more than 20 are all seasons. Few, especially the Greece destinations, are only in Wizz Air´s flight program in summertime.

So we opened the Wizz Air booking site and looked where Wizz Air flies from Vienna.

Not bad! We created an Excel file with all destinations and categorized them as “must see”, “nice to see” and “no priority”. London was #1, as our kids live there. Spain and Italy were always great destinations for us as we love their culture, the cities, the landscape and really everything about those countries! Abu Dhabi is great as a Wizz Air hub and Rhyad opens a new country for us. Nice is always good for a short trip. We have never been to Madeira but only heard good things, right to the top with it! Greek destinations are marvelous, but only served in Summer by Wizz Air and the flights will likely be pretty full. Cluj in Romania: friends told us it is worth a trip! Ohrid? My hairdresser comes from Ohrid and she said the lake over there is wonderful! On the list! Some cities were to dangerous for us at the moment (Tel Aviv), some have unconvenient flight times (Yerevan) and others we did just not prioritze as we do not know enough about them, knew them already well or just thought they were not so interesting.

We then looked at flight schedules for the destinations in the first two categories (days, flight times), for the flights and the return flights. We also checked the seasonality of the flight schedules (does Wizz Air serve those destinations only in summer or winter…) and made a high level assessment of the risk of not getting a return ticket (read more about that in our blog entry next week: “Plan B”). Inconvenient flight times or limited number of flights changed the order of our prioritized destinations a little bit.

Only direct flights?

But we would not leave it with that! There are three Wizz Air-hubs which offered interesting connections from Vienna with just one plane change (you can buy three flight segments per day, no problem to change flights!): Abu Dhabi, London and Rome. They opened the windows to destinations like the Maldives, Oman, Baku, Tashkent, Samarkand, Marrakesh, Lisbon, Sicily or Sardinia. No doubt we had to enhance our list by some more interesting destinations! (unfortunately, Warsaw has no direct Wizzair connection to Vienna – Warsaw would offer some nice destinations for WIZZ All You Can Fly as well!).

Budapest opens even more places to go!

In a third step, we looked at destinations from Budapest, Wizz Air´s home base. Budapest Airport is just a 2 ½ hour drive from Vienna, so why not combine a WIZZ All You Can Fly-trip with a day or two in that lovely city!

Finally, we ended up with a pretty long list of interesting places to fly in for a weekend or even longer. Many short haul destinations, some more difficult to reach. And though we tend to afford business class for long hauls, in the case of WIZZ All You Can Fly we decided to see this program as a sports-exercise. If we can get to the Maldives and back for € 40,- each (four booking fees) we would bear the pretty narrow Wizz Air-seating in an overnight flight!

Unfortunately, we are very busy end of September and all of October. There will be likely only one slot in that timeframe giving us the chance to try WIZZ All You Can Fly. For our first flight we decided to take an easy, low risk target (low risk in the sense of not having trouble to come home): London (to visit our kids), Bilbao or Cluj, which are nice places for city hoppers.

See how that works out first and then go for the complicated bookings!

Still we thought what happens if we get stranded without a return flight. This is a question we dedicated quite some time to. Read next week about our contingency planning!

What are your preferred destinations? Let us know how you plan your trips and tell us about your experience with WIZZ All You Can Fly!