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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

How does the prospect of a year of unlimited flights within Europe and as far as the Maldives for a flat fare of £9 per hop sound? Well, if you’re tempted, you have until midnight tonight (Thursday 15 August) to sign up for the Wizz Air “all you can fly” deal in return for a payment of £430 – miss the deadline and the same deal will cost £85 more.

The offer is effectively a standby deal: you can only book your flight 72 hours ahead – and, as you may imagine, a fair number of terms and conditions apply.

I have been wading through the rules and rewards so you didn’t have to.

Is the idea of unlimited standby flights new?

No. They were big in the 1990s, in the US at least. You paid around £300 to Delta or Northwest and flew around America and even Canada on a shoestring for a month. Like the new deal with Wizz Air, it was a standby ticket – but it was also completely free. You would turn up, show your ticket and step on board if there was at least one empty seat.

The Wizz Air “All you can fly” deal is rather different. You pay the upfront fee of €499 (£430) by midnight on 15 August, which works out at £37 per month. From 16 August onwards the fee rises to €599 (£515).

For each flight you book online a maximum of three days ahead, and you must pay a flat fee of £9 for each flight.

Even so, once you’ve made the down payment, £9 per flight sounds an amazing deal?

Yes. The deal extends across almost all the Wizz Air network, which extends far and wide:

Reaching some of those is a bit of a stretch: to get from Luton to the Maldives you will need to fly to somewhere in eastern Europe, then to Abu Dhabi and onwards to the Maldives.

Under the scheme you can take up to three flights a day – theoretically over 1,000 in a year.

The £9 fee stays the same as long as you don’t want a pre-assigned seat, any baggage bigger than a small backpack or anything to eat or drink on board. All of those are extras.

Are seats available on every flight?

No – and be warned that even if seats are still on sale to the public there’s no guarantee you will be able to avail of the deal. Wizz Air wants this offer to help it fill seats on flights that the airline knows it will never completely fill.

Wizz is being coy about availability, saying: “The provision of flight tickets depends on a number of internal and external factors These factors include, but not limited to the a) number of total registered members of Wizz All you can fly, b) number of overall passengers with booking to the given flight, and the c) seat capacity of the given flight.”

Any other catches?

The big one is: most of us want to go there and back when we travel. But you can only book 72 hours ahead. So for a one-week holiday, halfway through you’d need to be searching for a seat on a flight home. The airline says: “If there is no return flight available due to seat unavailability … you can book a flight using the regular booking process.”

The deal works better for a short weekend trip, because you should be able to book both legs with the deal.

Other issues:

Are you a buyer?

No one likes a cheap ticket more than I do, but I am not tempted. I typically fly around half-a-dozen times a year with Wizz. Assuming I could get on every one of those six flights with my standby pass, I would be paying £475 – a hefty £79 per trip.

The Wizz Air network overlaps substantially with other airlines – British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair. So I might be able to double the number of flights to 12. Each of that dozen would cost £44 with the airpass. That figure is pretty close to the average I pay for Ryanair.

I prefer to maintain the flexibility to choose the optimum flight time rather than restrict myself to a single carrier.

So who would it suit?

Frivolous flyers who have time on their hands. For those who want to explore Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, and for whom the burden of being unable to book the desired flight is not too heavy, the prospect of a year in the skies may well be tempting.

People lucky enough to live near Luton, Wizz Air’s main UK base; reaching the airport will add extra cost.

Travellers who regularly commute on routes with relatively high frequency. Twice a month for a year is potentially 48 flights, or less than £10 each. Add on the £9 charge for each flight, and you are still paying less than an express rail ticket from London to Luton or Gatwick. If you have two homes, then the problem of luggage will evaporate, too.

Unlimited flying seems extremely damaging for the environment?

As long as the passenger is occupying a seat that would otherwise be empty – which is Wizz Air’s firm plan – the marginal impact is the small amount of fuel burnt to fly the extra weight of the person and their baggage.

So it is less damaging than buying a ticket normally, which creates demand and informs airlines’ decisions about future flight planning. But the question for every traveller should be: is your journey really necessary?