Tag Archives for wow air.
The first real, tangible move from Wow Air 2.0 seems to have been spotted: a Wow Air Cafe in D.C.’s West End.
Icelandic media reported that the nascent airline planned to offer “a sales office and a facility where people can sit down, have a coffee and browse the possibilities.”
I don’t expect a December launch. Launching air service between the U.S. and Iceland in the winter is about the worst idea I’ve heard. Wow Air was once a great low cost carrier, if not a great business. It looks to me as though it could just become the next Avatar Airlines or Baltia.
Michele Ballarin is a West Virginia heiress who served as a go-between with Somali pirates and tried to get the CIA to hire her to kill Al Qaeda jihadists. She was “a trusted confidante of Somali pirates and warlords.”
Ballarin ran for Congress in the 1980s in Morgantown but the 31 year old lost badly, paying for her campaign “with money from her first husband, a man several decades older than her who had landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day and amassed a small fortune as a real-estate developer.” She and her second husband, a bartender at Manhattan’s 21 Club, moved to Georgetown and then moved to an estate in Markham, Virginia named “Wolf’s Crag,” which had belonged to a famous Confederate commander known as “The Black Knight of the Confederacy.”
In November 2017 American Airlines announced Dallas Fort-Worth – Reykjavik service. They were only flying there because two Icelandic carriers started flying to Dallas. It was classic capacity dumping. Now with those airlines gone from the market, American is pulling out too — and moving their Reykjavik flight to Philadephia, where they’d have logically put it all along.
The goal of the crowdfunding effort is to “collect at least 10-20,000 shareholders” which will invest in Wow Air or – if that plan fails – “a new low cost airline.” The likelihood of this effort succeeding seems very low, and that’s a good thing.
Ultimately businesses fail for a reason. That’s a good thing, and just as important as their succeeding. In this case Wow Air’s departure makes room for other carriers to succeed – or at least reduce their bleed.
Ironically Wow Air itself provided free flights to journalists to influence coverage, and of course stories about the imminent demise of the low cost carrier turned out to be accurate rather than fake news.
On Sunday I asked whether transatlantic low cost carrier Wow Air was toast. I phrased it in the form of a question but pointed out that while the answer to internet posts phrased as a question is almost always ‘no’ in this case it was probably the opposite.
This morning they ceased operations while stranding passengers. Your best recourse at this point if you hold tickets is likely to be with your credit card company. Claims by unsecured creditors with the airline’s bankruptcy administrator are far less likely to be successful.
For the last several years fares between the US and Europe have been available at incredibly low prices, driven down by a generation of ultra low cost carriers — deep discount airlines no longer just flying short haul routes, but operating across the Pond the way that Freddie Laker’s Skytrain service once pioneered.
There have been too many players flying too many seats at too low a price for too long, in a market that’s long been challenging, and airlines trying to make it in this environment have struggled. Wow Air could be next to fall.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
At the beginning of the month I wrote about minor transatlantic player Primera Air shutting down. Now Wow Air is eliminating 5 routes — including Dallas Fort-Worth and New York JFK, which they had refused to confirm yesterday.
There has been talk about British Airways parent IAG acquiring Norwegian as a way to kill low fare competition.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
