This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far.

“The impossible dream” from the Musical “Man of La Mancha”

“You´ll never get to the Maldives!” – That´s what the Wizz All you Can Fly sceptics told us from the beginning. “Wizz Air won´t release tickets for the fancy destinations! You need two tickets, to Abu Dhabi and the on to Malé -how would you get seats for two persons on two connecting flights? No way!”

Well, here we are, sitting on the flight back from Malé to Abu Dhabi, already checked in for the connection flight from Abu Dhabi to Vienna. The Bose Free SoundSport in my ears, listening to one of my favourite Mozart concerts and writing this blog entry.

Its 8:25am in Maldives, Europe is still sleeping and the sun shines on the pink engine of our Wizz Air Airbus 321 to my left. We left Malé 15 minutes early. Great, we should have enough time to visit the Abu Dhabi Louvre before boarding for the flight home.

Time to revisit how it all started!

How to plan a Wizz All You Can Fly Maldives trip

I am not on Facebook, but my wife is. There is a facebook group in which Wizz All You Can Fly customers exchange information and their experience. Many of them take it – like us – as a sports to travel to many different locations using the program. Apart from some payment issues, which we did fortunately not encounter in our six trips so far, the main topic discussed in that Facebook group is how to forecast availability of tickets.

There are many tipps flying around and some pretty sophisticated tools in the community. But we stick to our simple model which worked out well in the past and also worked for the Maldives. We look at

• the seasonality of the passenger load factor for the long run, and
• the ticket prices as indicator for the short run.

The seasonality is important, as obviously planes are more full in high season than in low season. Remember, it is both: seasonality in your target destination as well as your city of origin.

Abu Dhabi – Malé was easy to get

In the case of Maldives, the top season there is from Christmas to end of March/April. Apart from the hotels having moon prices in those months, it is a fair assumption that the planes will be pretty full and All You Can Fly-tickets less likely available. When doing our longterm planning for our Wizz All You Can Fly-year, we decided to target the Maldives for End of October or November. This is the time when the monsoon changes – the rain season stopps and the dry season starts. One may be unlucky with the weather then, but hotel prices are reasonable and its worth taking the weather risk we thought (Teaser: we were lucky and had a perfect week!).

Checking the list of available All You Can Fly-flights issued every morning by Wizz Air, Abu Dhabi – Malé and Malé – Abu Dhabi where always on that list in all October. We where quite confident to get those tickets.

Vienna – Abu Dhabi is the bottleneck

Here, the seasonality of the city of origin kicked in: In Austria there is a school autumn break in the last week of October. All the world is flying to get some sun before a hard winter. For this week it might be hard to get tickets from Vienna to Abu Dhabi, we thought. And exactly that was the case when we checked for availability.

Now that is where the ticket prices as indicators play a key role: most people book their trips longer term, and Airlines change their ticket prices according to the demand for the individual flight. And you can bet Wizz Air are experts in this!

Again, no surprises. Starting early October we followed the cheapest ticket prices for both legs, Vienna to Abu Dhabi and Abu Dhabi to Malé. While Abu Dhabi to Malé always was more or less the same base price (the minimum Wizz Air would charge for this route), there were big differences in the price for the Vienna – Abu Dhabi tickets. As long as the cheapest ticket for this route was under € 100,-, we were confident that there was enough space on the plane and All You Can Fly tickets would be made available. Wizz Air´s top principle is to max out the passenger load factor, so cheap tickets means there are still lots of spare seats. Once the price for the cheapest ticket moves up to over € 150,- or even over € 300,- on some days for the one way trip to Abu Dhabi, forget about All You Can Fly-seats.

Doing our homework, from Mid-October on, Nov 2 turned out to be our target date with a high lieklyhood for getting tickets for leaving Vienna, and we also found the hotel prices in Maldives quite attractive for the first week of November.

One night stopover in Abu Dhabi or Dubai highly recommended

In theory, the connection times between arrival in Abu Dhabi and the departure for Maldives give you sufficient time, even if the incoming flight has a delay. For us, a one night stopover was important though for three reasons:

• First and foremost, we are not the youngest anymore and having two flights of more than five hours in a plane with short haul seating and the second flight over night (leaving Abu Dhabi at 1 am) is something we wanted to avoid (sleeping in an upright position in a plane is one of the worst things for me!);
• Second, we like Dubai and having a stopover there is always a nice thing (Dubai is only 1 1/2 hours by Bus or Taxi from Abu Dhabi Airport)
• The third reason was really a “first world problem”: as the resort we chose in the Maldives needed a lead time of 96 hour (4 days) to organize the seaplane transfer, we had to be sure to get a flight. Only being able to book Vienna Abu Dhabi with a three day lead time, with the direct connection from Abu Dhabi to Malé we would not have met the 96 hours advance booking request for the seaplane transfer.

So the sequence of booking was:

1. Book Vienna – Abu Dhabi for Nov 2^nd as soon as tickets are available (3 days in advance)
2. Having those tickets confirmed, book the Resort on the Maldives with the seaplane transfer for one week starting Nov 4^th.
3. Book a hotel in Malé for the night before the flight back, as Wizz Air leaves Malé at 8:05am and this is to early for a seaplane transfer from the resort to Malé.
4. Get the Malé flight once the booking window opens. Backup plan: buy the ticket from Abu Dhabi to Malé. We did not need the backup plan.
5. Decide on the return ticket (see below).
6. Fill in the “Imuga”, the obligatory “Traveller Declaration Form” for the Maldives.
7. Book a hotel for the stopover in Dubai.

Bureaucratic hurdles for your trip to the Maldives

Maldivian red tape is the biggest hurdle for Wizz All You Can Fly to Maldives. Not only do you have to prebook all you hotels before and have a booking confirmation, which is admittedly the easy part. You also have to show a return ticket including the booking code when entering the Maldives. This is certainly the most discussed topic amongst Wizz All You Can Fly-customers going to Maldives.

Flying along the coast of Oman.

How to overcome the return ticket issue

There are basically three ways to handle this request of Maldivian Authorities:

1. Buy a cheap return ticket in advance.
2. Buy a flexible ticket with cancellation option.
3. Ignore the requirement of a return ticket and risk to be rejected at Border Control.

We did not even consider option one, as we though buying a ticket would hurt the spirit of All You Can Fly!

We had never been to the Maldives before and we got mixed information about the border controls, therefore trying to enter the Maldives without a return tickets seemed too risky for us (We were wrong, more about that later).

So we went on and decided to buy a fully cancellable return ticket. We would not buy it with Wizz Air (which would have been € 300-400 p.p.) as we did not know how their refund process would work. Even more importantly, Wizz Air may track their customer behaviour and we would get problems with All You Can Fly if we cancelled a paid ticket and requested an All You Can Fly ticket for the same flight.

Said and done, after reading the Terms & Conditions three times and reconfirming them on the Airline Hotline we bought two fully flexible Economy Class Austrian Airlines Tickets from Malé to Vienna for € 1.800 each (!), received the booking confirmation with the booking code, printed it all, put it in our travel file and cancelled the tickets 10 min. later. The full refund was on our credit card on the same day. The only cost incurring was unfortunately a foreign exchange difference, as they charged the tickets in USD and we got different rates for buying and selling. Annoying, but still only a few dollars.

All obstacles mastered, we filled in the IMUGA, the traveller declaration form. As stated before, you have to fill in lots of personal data even the names of the prebooked hotels, the flight you are coming in, but not the return flight booking code.

Once all the stuff is filled in, you get a form 10 min. later carrying a QR code which should be printed and carried along on your trip. This form you should present at border control, the guidelines state.

The moment of truth – Border Control

In Malé, we were the first to debarked the airplane and instantly queued up at border control. Passports and our IMUGA forms and (already cancelled) return flight confirmations ready to present. Watching about eight counters and 50-60 passenger passing border control before us, we were the only ones having that IMUGA form ready, not to speak of flight confirmations!

When we presented our passports to a very nice officer, I wanted to give him  the IMUGA printout – no need, he said, its all in the computer! Return flight confirmation: haha, nobody cared about it, no one was asked about it!

Now this is not an advice and we would not take responsibility if you get rejected or jailed or whatever: but we concluded for us that next time we will not book a return flight just for presenting it at border control in Maldives!

The return flights

All had worked out so well! The flight from Vienna to Abu Dhabi was quite full (but still seats available). The flight from Abu Dhabi to Malé had a load of 169 passenger at a capacity of 240. Lots of space on the plane, we of course had chosen random seat assignment at check in, but not surprisingly found a row that belonged just to the two of us.

With this experience, we were pretty relaxed to get the return tickets with Wizz All You Can Fly for good reasons. And indeed, it was super easy to book the return flights and board with a little more luggage than the “carry-on-bag” policy of Wizz Air would allow! But more on luggage restrictions next week!

How much did we save?

Compared to the cheapest tickets at the time of booking, we saved € 410,- p.p. for the whole trip, so € 820,- in total! How does that compare to the total price of the trip? Read next week!

Flying cheap means packing smartly!

Planning the stay on the Maldives

 In the Facebook group mentioned above one chap who has been to the Maldives and stayed only in Malé recommended to not do the stay only there in the cheapest way you can. We could not agree more!

The Maldives are expensive. You can spend a small (or even a big fortune) in very short time there. But there is also accommodation and islands for budget conscious travellers.  The only general observation we would have is that under any circumstances you should avoid to travel just to Malé! People are friendly and helpful, nothing to worry about. But one night there if you have a late flight in or an early flight out is more than enough. Get out to the islands!

As we already mentioned, we take Wizz All You Can Fly as a sports challenge. Travelling long hauls in budget airlines with 71cm seating is quite an experience for itself. Saving on flights, we thought it is worthwhile dedicating a budget to our trips that allows us to indulge in some luxury when we believe it is worth it. And in Maldives it definitely was worth it!

Find out together with us next week!

PS: It is great to hear from you experience! Share them with us! And we invite you to follow our Hungarian Wizz All You Can Fly-friends and their www.allyoucanfly.com blog. They fly from Budapest and already reached other wonderful destinations which are on our list too!