RIP, Wow Air.

[randomness]

Icelandic low-fare carrier Wow Air just stopped flying, stranding passengers on both sides of the Atlantic. The Washington Post has a story on what to do if you're stuck: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/i-have-a-wow-air-ticket-what-happens-now/2019/03/28/2bda45f0-5182-11e9-8d28-f5149e5a2fda_story.html

I'm sad about this, not because I ever had much intention of flying with them, but because when the transatlantic low-fare airlines like Laker Airways and People Express Airlines stop flying, the network carriers raise their prices.

RIP, Wow. Hope Norwegian stays in the air until the end of the summer.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

... are they allowed to just strand people? Goodness. Going out of business is one thing but putting people in danger is another.

[redbird]

I think this is an "allowed" of there not being a good way to prevent it, if an airline gets to this point: if they're genuinely out of money, it doesn't matter how large the fines would be for stranding people. None of that will change as long as company owners and upper management are insulated from legal responsibility, so WOW as a (no-longer-relevant) entity might be subject to fines, but the people who made the decisions to sell tickets for flights hours before they grounded everything have no legal responsibility. (This sort of crap is, I think, baked into corporate capitalism.) Also, if WOW really is that broke, it's not fair to expect the now-ex employees to work for free to get people home.

There's an underlying assumption in this sort of civil aviation that being stranded is a possibly expensive inconvenience but not actually dangerous, that being in (say) Boston when you planned to be in the Netherlands, or vice versa, won't endanger a vacationer. That's not exactly true, because plenty of people flying on low-cost airlines can't afford the extra time away from work, nights in hotels, etc., but "we have to get them home from vacation because they can't afford to extend their vacations" is a different shape of urgent from getting people home after a natural disaster, even to people who don't on some level believe you shouldn't be traveling if you don't have extra resources to deal with this sort of problem.

[dianec42]

Am I the only one who saw this and thought "World of Warcraft has an airline now?"

Obligatory nerd joke: What was the error message? 'Transfer aborted: Instance not found'?

[sylphon]

Yikes. But maybe other low fare operators will emerge.

[randomness]

I'm hoping so.

These things tend to come in waves. Aspiring airline owners find investors who are enthusiastic, they launch an airline, other owners find other investors, they all jump on the bandwagon.

Then the new airlines go bust, investors get scared, and no one tries this for a bit.

Then people forget, someone thinks they can make money with a new airline, they find investors, etc.

Every so often someone succeeds in building a new airline, which encourages people to think they could be that someone, too.