The annual airline survey carried out by Which? has ranked low cost carrier Wizz Air as the worst UK airline in its latest findings.
In the survey, which asked over 8,000 travellers, Wizz Air received a one star rating for boarding, cabin environment and seat comfort.
Combined with Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) data revealing it as one of the least punctual airlines it isn’t surprising that Which? ranked it lower than British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair, the latter being the recipient of the worst airline for many of the previous surveys.
Which? also criticised the airline for seemingly opening new routes and bases only to close them shortly afterwards as happened Cardiff Airport (CWL/EGFF) and Doncaster Sheffield Airport, although Doncaster Airport actually closed completely.
Wizz Air has also cancelled more flights over the last year than any other UK airline with 1.8% of flights during the survey period being cancelled with less than 24 hours notice.
Wizz Air recently came under fire from the CAA after it was found to be failing to meet its obligations to passengers when flights were cancelled.
In this survey, last years worst airline Ryanair came in at 58% overall with Wizz Air at 48%.
The airline has hit back though saying that it “strongly disputes this claim as the survey methodology is misleading and the results are not representative. This is confusing to customers, as well as the general public.”
In a statement, Marion Geoffroy, UK Managing Director at Wizz Air UK, said: “We do not consider the findings of this report to be representative or the methodology used to be transparent. Sample sizes are completely different for every airline – only 124 Wizz Air passengers were surveyed, while Which? spoke to several thousand people who had flown with some of our competitors. Wizz Air UK flew 12.2 million passengers in the last year alone, and the sample from Which? has surveyed less than 0.001% of our customer base. The results are most certainly not what we are hearing from our customer surveys. It is unclear how Which? can come to these conclusions when only 1.15% of their respondents said they flew with Wizz Air.
“We have been honest about our performance in summer 2022, which was not up to our standards, and that is why we invested more than £90 million to rectify this. We completed 99.23% of our flights in the period covering October 2022-September 2023, and in the last fiscal year, our on-time performance was better than all but one of our major competitors. Over the same fiscal period, we saw a 67.4% reduction in the number of cancellations and more than 90% of refunds and claims were processed within five days. This is some of the strongest data across the whole industry.
“We conduct customer satisfaction surveys across our network and hundreds of thousands of passengers have said they are satisfied with the service we provide. Our results show our customer satisfaction has improved year-on-year and is significantly higher than this report suggests. Wizz Air’s brand consideration is higher than our main UK competitor and the Civil Aviation Authority has confirmed that Wizz Air is fully complying with its commitments to customers following the deed of undertaking signed last year. We are proud of this progress and are confident that the public’s perception will become more reflective of our current performance, which is among the best in the UK.”
The CAA has recently said that the issues that had plagued Wizz Air regarding customer support and refunds have now been reviewed and the airline is now fully compliant thus avoiding further action by the regulator.
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