Mikey Mike Mike

Thanks CWS - really interesting to read!!

My best friend (best ever for clarity) worked for BMI. He had previously worked for a charter airline which folded and lost his job. BMI treated him well and he moved to BA eurofleet on the merger. He (and I) are well aware of the angst and stress that employees of an ailing airline experience when they are likely to be out of a job any day

In this case, I think WW bought it on partially themselves. With a rigid zero tolerance to any transgression which would result in another fee / charge, that is not sustainable. The only airline who seems to be immune to this phenomena is RyanAir who despite insulting most, continue to succeed. Even the CEO of WOW admitted they should be less pedantic at the check in / gate but the damage seems to have been done. Some of the tales of lost baggage, connections and compensation eventually catch up with you

Two A330s and two A320s have been returned to the lessor and sit at Lourdes in storage.

In a free market, the consumer and banks have the final say -the banks are about to, and low occupancy on flights also says to me that despite the fares, the customer may have given up too if the overall experience is negative.

As a word of warning to the legacy carriers, please don't be smug and raise your fares. The reason customers left you in the first place was high fares and poor services.
Now that BA and others have raced to the bottom with buy on board, paid wifi, densified aircraft and more - do they retain this low quality of service, or raise the bar and return to good old fashioned in flight service. I so SO miss the BA in flight service of 10 years ago.

corporate-wage-slave

Return flights and other notes

The return flights also went to plan. BOS-KEF was about 70% full, a bit more than the outbound and KEF-LGW was nearly full, in line with the outbound. The aircraft were different - they didn't have Big Seats on them, nor power sockets, and the seats were not the thinnest Recaro seats used widely in Europe these days. Of which more to come.

I could also check in online this time, and this is how the seat selection window works, bearing in mind I had already paid for seating when I bought the ticket.



OLCI timing was a bit different, I could check in for both sectors at 24 hours from the first sector, whereas to the USA it was 24 hours before the departure of the KEF-USA service, which is the second sector.

From BOS Wow uses terminal E, effectively the international terminal at Logan. No PreCheck, but the Wow flight is at a quiet period in the day, departing 18:20, so I was through on conventional security within a few minutes and with no queue. I then went to the Air France lounge using my Priority Pass card - this has a technical 3 hour maxima but since they don't check the boarding pass I can't see that being enforced. The Air France lounge has a reasonable if basic selection of hot and cold food and drinks, though it's not a patch on BA's magnificent BOS lounge. Prosecco is available. It was fairly quiet in there so it worked for me.

Boarding started at 17:50, in line with what the boarding pass suggested. And again I got 3 seats to myself, as did the woman on the other side of the row. I think we were the only two to be this fortunate, but basically all, or almost all single travellers had an empty seat next to them. I did get quite a fair bit of sleep on the service, which arrived early into KEF on the Westerlies. The flight time was 4 hours 40 minutes. The KEF interchange was as before, very easy and hassle free since going to the UK didn't mean having to enter Schengen. In my state of sleep I don't remember much about the KEF-LGW service other than that this was a full flight and so I didn't have an empty middle seat there. I can't report on the service levels on either flight.

LGW arrival was into South Terminal, and I was through the passport e-gates in just a few minutes - and on my train to London within 20 minutes of arrival into LGW.

Older seating
This non neo A321 had the previous generation of Recaro seating. Much thicker and more padded, but not necessarily any more comfortable. The spacing is about the same as the neo shown on the outbound photos. This aircraft didn't have Big Seats or the middle seat blocked with a tray; it did have a set of seats with XL seating on starboard by dint of a greater pitch compared to the other (port) side of the aisle. Another difference was that the emergency row seats had a storage pouch, which wasn't present on the neo aircraft.








And so this flight was efficient and as someone used to A321 flights in Europe, some of which are 3 or 4 hours long, this was for me just like 2 shorthaul European services bolted together. Would I do it again? Not sure. The routes which were more interesting to me such as St. Louis are the ones being cut from the schedule, and while YUL (Montréal) is a particularly short ride, the fares on that sector are a bit higher than BOS and not much cheaper than alternative carriers. On the other hand it's relatively quick and easy to get to KEF from my base airport of Edinburgh, thanks to Easyjet and indeed Wow during the summer, and so if I take a risk on separate ticketing in the case of easyJet then it has some merit on the shorter sectors. However the absolute key is not to pay for any extras, even inflight water ($3), if you can avoid it.

General points
- All my flights were on A321 aircraft. As far as I can make out, Wow's fleet is now just 16 aircraft, 1 is an A330 for use on the West Coast and the new India services, one A320neo the rest are A321, some of which are neo.
- all seats have overhead airvents and lights
- power sockets are only on some aircraft (multi adapter socket and USB), two sockets between 3 seats, but not in emergency rows
- there is no IFE or wifi on the aircraft however Wow do hire out content loaded iPads for hire for approx $20.
- there is a Wow inflight magazine (which seemed to be Lava Monthly as far as I could tell) and a separate shopping brochure for food, drink and duty free
- that shopping brochure is available online at https://wowair.us/travel-info/duty-free/ with the food and drink at the back of the brochure
- there were a number of Iccelandic excursion brochures also in the seat backs
- Wow doesn't have a frequent flyer scheme or any relation to other schemes
- if you don't pay for seating, Wow still spreads passengers evenly across the aircraft, they don't deliberately cram people together unless the flight is going to be full.
- there is a Wow service desk airside in KEF by the café area
- there is no practical paid for lounge option in KEF on Wow.
- and finally it seems that the correct pronunciation of Wow is Woe, with a bit of a w sound at the end. Two of captains on my flights were from the UK and they pronounced Wow to rhyme with cow.

icebird