You ask me where did I fall
I’ll say I can’t tell you when
But if my spirit is strong
I know it can’t be long
No questions I’m not alone
Somehow I’ll find my way home

Jon&Vangelis, “Somehow I´ll find my way home”

Last week we talked about high-level planning prioritization of travel destinations. But there is only a 72-hour booking window for the flights.

Have you ever slept on an airport or desparately tried to get the last seat to return home for a family event or an important meeting?

Well, we had that experience, on Greek airports, in Brussels, in Miami and other places (and, to be honest, Miami was the best place to have that inconvenienve, spending an additional day in Miami Beach 😉

Anyway, lets talk about how to get back when you want to stay in a place longer than three days?

Somehow I´ll find my way home!

An important step for the detailed travel planning is to make sure you find your way home! This is obviously easier from some destinations than from others. You should consider

• How many daily/weekly flights does Wizz Air offer to/from your preferred destination?
• How much would the price for a paid return ticket be?
• Is there a way to get back through other Wizz Air hubs?
• Do other Airlines serve this destination?
• Is there any alternative route, ground transport etc. to get home?
• How much would unplanned additional nights in your preferred destination cost?
• How full is the plane likely to be?

The Passenger Load Factor – a WIZZ All You Can Fly-customer´s best friend!

The passenger load factor is a performance indicators airlines use to measure how full their planes are. While there is no public data by destination or flight number, fortunately the annual report of Wizz Air gives the passenger load factor over the whole Wizz Air fleet per calendar months:

Source: https://wizzair.com/en-gb/information-and-services/investor-relations/investors/traffic-statistics

From this graph we learn that Wizz Air never exceeds a passenger load factor of 95%. (Actually, this is a very high passenger load factor compared to other airlines!) In other words, passengers sat on 95% of the plane seats while a minimum of 5 % of the plane seats were not occupied. In Winter, the load factor is generally lower than in summer months.

Wizz Air operates Airbus 320 and 321 planes with a seat capacity of 180 to 239 seats. That means, even in the months with the highest load factor, e.g. July 2023 (94,9 %), 5,1 % percent of the seats would have been available. This equals about 9 seats on the smaller and 12 seats on the bigger planes.

On average!

Well, we have been on fully packed flights, but we have also been on flights with many free seats. We don´t know about the distribution of the passenger load factor. For sure there are destinations and times with higher load factors and some with lower.

How would you find out?

As airlines use flexible pricing systems, the price for the tickets is one indicator for the occupation. Go to google flights and compare the prices of the cheapest tickets for your preferred destination and watch that price as your planned trip date comes closer. The price level for the cheapest ticket is not a perfect but a good indicator, if Wizz Air expects the plane to be full or if the flight is already highly booked. The lower the price and the less price movement as your departure date comes closer, the higher should be your chance of getting a WIZZ All You Can Fly-ticket. This may be especially useful when you are estimating your return ticket availability.

Nevertheless, this is just rule of thumb-statistics. Flight bookings may behave particular on some flights, Wizz Air policies and strategies may distort the picture. Don´t forget, Wizz Air explicitely states that there is no guarantee that available seats on a flight will be made avaliable for All You Can Fly!

We believe it is worth though to monitor the ticket prices and know about the load factor!

Flight connections, destinations

Being based in Vienna is not bad for us with respect to WIZZ All You Can Fly. Wizz Air offers currently over 30 destinations from Vienna, in the winter season still over 20. Some of them with more than one flight a day, like London and Barcelona, quite interesting destinations.

London for us is good anyway, as our kids live there and we have a place to stay. So not getting a ticket one day does not matter, this gives us the chance to stay longer in that great city!

A few destinations have very few flights from and to Vienna. Madeira for example can be reached twice a week with Wizz Air, Tenerife three times a week. So not getting return tickets from those destinations can make the way home a hassle!

But it is not only the frequency of the flights which makes coming home easy or difficult. We also looked at alternative routes.

Luckily, Wizz Air has a number of hubs which offer lots of different destinations, especially overlapping destinations.

The most important for us being based in Vienna are London Gatwick, Rome and Abu Dhabi, which share some destinations with Vienna, and furthermore, open up new places like the Maldives (via Abu Dhabi).

But today, we write about contingency plans: being stuck in Madeira with no flight back home to Vienna makes travel home a with WIZZ All You Can Fly a little more complicated, but there is another way to get home: through Rome – but that will cost you a night in Rome, so it may be cheaper to buy a ticket.

Alternative Transport

Being ready to combine a plane ticket with alternative transport – ground transport – we could also fly from Madeira to Budapest and then take the train home to Vienna. There are cheap train tickets and this may not be the most convenient way to return, but at least another option to get where we want to.

Not getting a ticket from Abu Dhabi to Vienna can be overcome by taking the bus from Abu Dhabi Airport to Dubai Airport and flying from Dubai.

It may become really difficult to get home from remote destinations like Malé , Bishkek or Tashkent. With Abu Dhabi being the only hub serving those destinations with Wizz Air flights and basically no option to return by ground transport, there basically remain only three options if one choses to go there with WIZZ All You Can Fly:

• Buy a regular ticket (with WizzAir or another Airline): this may be the only option. We decided to include a “contingency budget” in our WIZZ All You Can Fly -plan. We reserved € 1.000,- for such inconveniencies (either for buying regular tickets or extra nights).
• Or, the option we consider for remote destinations, flying out with a WIZZ All You Can Fly ticket and book a regular ticket for the return flight in advance. This should be the safer and cheaper option.

In any case, if you have to use a fallback option, this will move the break even-point of then WIZZ All You Can Fly-membership and we will do everything to avoid that (and be it to avoid remote destinations, but the temptation is too big to go to Maldives.

You will read more about it, once we decide to go there!).

Let us know about your experience with return flights and all the acquaintances you made when you were stranded somewhere in the world!

See you next week!