Sign up for Simon Calder’s free travel email to receive expert advice and money-saving discounts
Get Simon Calder’s travel email
Looking back, it’s one of those in-flight phenomena – like free cigars on Concorde or unlimited visits to the cockpit – that seem hard to imagine. In the 1990s, the US standby Airpass gave you unlimited flights anywhere on Delta’s domestic network for a month. Even better, Northwest Orient (now part of Delta) took you across America and gave you access to a number of Canadian cities for little money.
The cost was a significant investment at the time: typically $499. But the benefits were not without reason: In addition to the opportunity to explore new cities and regions, meals were standard on most flights. And if you had no particular destination, you could snag three seats on a transcontinental flight east from Los Angeles or San Francisco to Delta’s galactic headquarters in Atlanta or Memphis – where Northwest had a huge hub for many years.
Arrive, show your ticket and board was the order of the day. On the rare occasions when everything was full, such as on a busy holiday weekend from Atlanta to Chicago, ground crew would make a special effort to find a more remote flight path to your final destination – which usually required a change of plane in Cincinnati.
By the early 21st century, however, such deals were virtually non-existent. Airlines discovered that airpasses were being used by people who would otherwise have paid a lot of money to fly from LAX to ATL or SFO to MEM. Travelers who needed to fly immediately were willing to pay whatever the airline asked. Airlines could raise prices as departure time approached, rather than lower them. And load factors—the percentage of seats filled—gradually increased, meaning it became harder to find empty seats.
Now the idea has been brought to Europe and extended by Wizz Air for a whole year by introducing the “All You Can Fly” subscription program.
Here’s what the deal looks like: You pay £445 up front (from Friday 16 August) and get heavily discounted package flights to all Wizz Air destinations for 12 months. The fee for each flight is £9.
They have a pretty long waiting window: 72 hours before departure. But instead of using it for an August bank holiday, the earliest start date is September 25. And crucially: “All You Can Fly member fares are not guaranteed to be available on every flight advertised by Wizz Air.”
Nobody likes cheap tickets more than me, but I’m not a shopper. Wizz Air is an excellent airline, and I typically fly with them about half a dozen times a year. Assuming I could access each of those six flights with my standby pass, I’d pay £499 – a whopping £84 per flight. Wizz Air’s network overlaps enough with my other preferred airlines – British Airways and EasyJet – that I could perhaps double the number of flights to 12. Each of those dozen flights would cost £45 with the Airpass. Yet even that amount is pretty close to the average I pay on Ryanair. I’d rather keep the flexibility to choose the optimal flight time rather than being limited to a single airline.
I can imagine that the offer seems tempting for people who commute regularly on relatively frequent routes. Twice a month for a year is potentially 48 flights, or less than £10 per flight. Add in the £9 fee for each flight and you’re still paying a lot less than a single ticket on the Gatwick Express. But at peak times there will be no flights left, and if there is significant disruption (like the air traffic control breakdown on August Bank Holiday last year) the seats will be gone. But for those who want to explore Europe and the Middle East and for whom the burden of not being able to book the flight they want is not too great, the prospect of a year in the air could well be tempting.
