Wizz Air announces 14 new Gatwick routes to compete with BA Euroflyer – but what’s it like?

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• Dan says:

  5 Jan5 January 09:48

  Bucharest is outstanding value for money and can’t recommend it enough for a city break

  • David says:

    5 Jan5 January 11:13

    Yup love Romania but don’t tell everyone !

  • John says:

    5 Jan5 January 12:15

    Was there for 24 hours as a tourist, did what I wanted and don’t think there’s any reason to go again. But would like to explore other parts of Romania.

• Chris says:

  5 Jan5 January 09:59

  I think one of the reasons Luton airport is not particularly good is because of the presence of the LCCs and their lack of staff. You can clearly see this when you enter the terminal. You have a scrum of people attempting to check their baggage with not enough staff to competently manage queues. For example on my last flight from Luton with Wizz Air the check-in agents were shouting for specific flights to come forward, thus the queue was slow moving as people ‘jumped’ the queue. The terrible queue management resulted in a lack of efficiency, a bad experience for the people being called forward and also a bad experience for people still in the queue. I think you can get away with a self organising queue if the queue is either short or the waiting time to service is also small, unfortunately it is neither. Thus you need active management which Wizz Air didn’t provide.

  Other aspects of Luton airport like security, airside amenities, etc. are mostly satisfactory.

  • JamesLHR says:

    5 Jan5 January 12:31

    The SGHA for the supply of check-in staff is marginally the same as legacy carriers for the aircraft type. The only specifics is the lack of segregation for dedicated cabins.

    Whilst there have been staff shortages, pandemic, local employment issues etc, there is on the whole a pretty reasonable head count at LTN for Wizz.

    The issue is that there are additional checks above and beyond due to covid. The airport does not have the check-in space, desks etc to allocate 100% of the requirement for this.

    Thus the queues generate and once they are behind, the only option is to call out those flights which are closing. They are called so the flight can be closed and depart.

    For what it’s worth, those who are queueing for a flight in 2 hours are not a priority when it comes to a flight leaving in 45 minutes which you need to close in order to have a load sheet etc.

    Wizz’s biggest issue is the consolidation of departures in the morning and evening waves. It’s not a legacy network carrier so it doesn’t need 10 flights to depart in 10 minutes for connectivity, but that’s what you have. It results in 4,500+ passengers in each wave.

• Matarredondaaa says:

  5 Jan5 January 10:14

  Flown Wizz from Luton a number of times since flights first began
  Obey the rules, no problem, but try and bend them and you will have issues
  Never find website particularly easy to use unlike EJ which feel is the best followed by Ryanair.

  • Alex Sm says:

    5 Jan5 January 10:16

    Following the rules is not a bad idea, is it?

• Dave says:

  5 Jan5 January 10:45

  I have used Wizzair many times and think they are very good,but when large hand luggage and seat cost is added BA usually cheaper when booked early.On every flight several passengers always get caught with oversized bags and have to pay.

• James says:

  5 Jan5 January 10:59

  We’ve had our May flights with Wizz to Alicante cancelled and when I looked to rebook couldn’t see any flight last out of Luton. Could they have dumped Luton in favour of the new Gatwick slots? Incidentally we rebooked Ryanair/BA from Gatwick for same dates for considerably less than we’d paid Wizz, still not seen my refund thinking about it 🤔

• Mike Hunt says:

  5 Jan5 January 11:11

  Yes deviate from the rules at your peril

• the_real_a says:

  5 Jan5 January 11:56

  The problem with Wizz is that unless you are simply travelling with a supermarket carrier bag, the price of adding a cabin bag more than doubles the headline price. Wizz is not cheap and a hugely frustrating process to compare against other carriers.

  • SamG says:

    5 Jan5 January 12:38

    Same with Easyjet and Ryanair now – e.g. carrying on a wheeled case to the Canaries on Easyjet is £40+ pp . Definitely something to consider when comparing to BA

• James Vickers says:

  5 Jan5 January 13:28

  The concept of a cheap wizz flight was more fun when you didn’t have to add testing costs unfortunately.

  A few years ago managed to see lots of interesting places in Europe off the beaten track thanks to wizz.

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