Wizz Air now charging some travellers a strange extra fee (2020)

https://thepointsguy.co.uk/news/wizz-air-ad-blocking-fee/

by madjam002 • 4 years ago

251 207 4 years ago

thepointsguy.co.uk

madjam0023• 4 years ago

Just tried this myself, sure enough as you scroll down to the card payment section on the final page of the checkout flow (after all the optional upsells, seat selection etc), the price increases by £10 x per passenger thanks to a "System surcharge" that is added. You wouldn't notice the charge being added unless you explicitly looked out for it, as it only appears when you start scrolling the page down to the card details form.

Disabling ad block results in the charge not being applied.

What's even more baffling is I had to complete a reCAPTCHA half way through the checkout flow, so them saying it's to do with bot detection is a stretch.

Edited as I forgot to mention the captcha code during checkout flow.

c7DJTLrn• 4 years ago

Soon they'll be charging extra for the flight to be on time. Both my recent inbound and outbound flights were delayed extensively...

harvey93• 4 years ago

In a sense they do: compensation for delays is enforced by law in Europe.

YetAnotherNick• 4 years ago

Do they compensate the passenger?

Aachen• 4 years ago

Yeah I tried that. People at the counter laughed "you can't do this here" (we were all right there and delayed by the same amount, why not just hand us the cash? Wire it to the accounts from which we paid the ticket? Sign us up automatically and send us the forms?). Okay, I said, where can I do this then? "On our website probably." Okay I open the website, after navigating a horrible attempt at a mobile site for fifteen minutes I found the form and filled it out. Never heard from them again. Guess I should take them to court now?

Railways (NL, DE) pull the same sort of crap. In NL there is a centralized billing system, they know exactly what path you took and when, so also that you were in the delay. Credit it to your transport card automatically? Nah. You need to fill out paperwork and then get a few euros for missing half of your evening. Germany is even better: whenever there's delays, you see long queues at the service center because (according to my colleague with whom I was there) you need to get something stamped IRL as proof that you were really there during the delay. And the amount you get back is still peanuts.

Incentives like these to be on time don't work. I can't imagine more than a handful of people per trainload/planeload go through the hassle. At least for planes iirc it was a reasonable amount, at least for short delays where you don't have to book an entire holiday around. If you'd get it without a legal battle.

chrisseaton7• 4 years ago

You’re eligible for compensation in those cases - claim for it.

Swenrekcah• 4 years ago

My flight wasn’t delayed, instead they announced as we were taking off that they needed to fly a detour and stop there for 40 minutes to refill the plane because they apparently couldn’t calculate how much fuel they needed.

sokoloff• 4 years ago

Zero chance that was an inability to calculate. Far more likely that it was economically driven somehow.

p1necone• 4 years ago

How does this even help?

Surely for the people who visit the site and do buy a ticket the revenue lost from them blocking ads would be basically insignificant compared to what they pay for their tickets. And obviously the people that visit the site while blocking ads and don't pay for a ticket won't be paying the surcharge.

I guess ultimately it helps by just bringing in extra revenue via a sneaky hidden charge that most people won't realize is there. But it doesn't really have anything to do with ad revenue.

chrisseaton7• 4 years ago

Maybe adverts from a confirmed traveller going to a particular destination are valuable?

jacquesm9• 4 years ago

Not as valuable as the typical EU fine for these kind of nasty tricks.

aendruk3• 4 years ago

Presumably by impeding competitors who attempt to automatically price match.

For those who didn’t read the full article (I don’t blame you; it’s nearly illegible—font weight 86‽) the airline intended to price-discriminate against automated scrapers, not against people who don’t view ads, but distinguishing between robots and humans is futile in practice.

singlow• 4 years ago

It's a bug. They didn't intend for it to flag ad-blockers, it was supposed to inflate the prices for third party aggregators so that their direct website would look cheaper than booking on a third-party site.

MonkeyMalarky• 4 years ago

Shit, Ticket Master is missing out on some real innovation here!

DanAtC• 4 years ago

AXS already stops working outright in the middle of buying tickets if Apple's Private Relay is enabled.

karamanolev• 4 years ago

Time for adblockers to add the whole Wizz domain to their lists then?

littlestymaar2• 4 years ago

If you do book any Wizz Air flights and notice any unexplained extra charges in your booking summary, turn off ad-blocking software, which should remove the surcharge.

Do not turn you ad-blocking software (that's what they want), instead warn your local consumer protection authority, and email a copy of your reporting to Wizz Air, I'm pretty sure the £10 fee is going to disappear as well, for you and luckily for everyone else.

chrisseaton7• 4 years ago

Your local consumer protection authority won’t have any idea what you’re talking about - they aren’t experts in these things.

jacquesm9• 4 years ago

They are going to hit them hard and they know very well what they are doing. I really don't know where you got that idea but EU consumer protection authorities have teeth and they bite when it suits them. This sort of stuff will not fly, and I'm pretty sure the various privacy authorities will also want to put in a word or two.

airstrike3• 4 years ago

As a general concept, I'm not opposed to having to pay for a service instead of seeing ads. Or even better, to be able to choose whether I want a free service with ads or a paid service with no ads.

But if I'm already paying for the service (in this case, the airline ticket) why are you trying to show me ads? This makes absolutely zero sense

krm01• 4 years ago

Perhaps the ads help make it cheaper

paradaux• 4 years ago

There is no universe where Wizz is earning £10 per visitor booking a ticket through their website. Ads are dollars or parts of a dollar per thousand clicks

ErikVandeWater2• 4 years ago

Yes, also, all airlines have ads visible to you. The name on of the airline is a big billboard on every plane. It's not actually necessary. I'm honestly surprised airlines don't put more ads on their planes, but perhaps there is some regulation preventing that.

peoplefromibiza6• 4 years ago

it doesn't make sense anyway.

Me blocking ads should make flights less cheap for everybody, not more expensive only for me.

Ads are not part of the deal when I am buying flight tickets.

Unless they can prove me blocking ads costed them 10 pounds and I have accepted those terms.

teeray• 4 years ago

Or, it could be the same price, but an airline MBA wants to squeeze out some ad impressions from you along with your full-price ticket.

gaze2• 4 years ago

This is never how it works out. The ticket price is set to what people will pay for it. Everything else — ads and all, are just additional profit.

IncRnd2• 4 years ago

The very act of selling over the web in an automated fashion makes the sale cheaper for Wizz compared to selling via a ticket agent. And, no bit of code costs Wizz £10 per sale.

Ad revenue isn't needed to recoup sale-costs, because those exist for people who do not purchase. Those costs are zeroed out for the people who do purchase.

dalbasal3• 4 years ago

The general concept is, IMO, deceiving.

Making ads optional is often suggested, sometimes tried, and there aren't many success stories. Most successful combinations of ad/payment commercial strategies aren't customer choice scenarios.

Most subscription papers made more on ads than subscriptions, but subscribership made ads sell at a premium. The stable revenue is nice too. Ryanair clones use advertising as within their get-an-extra-penny ethos. Buses and such do the same.

A lot of people seem to like the theory of paid opt-out... but that doesn't seem to be a thing.

bruckie• 4 years ago

YouTube premium seems to be a counterexample. I wonder why it's managed to stick around (and be pushed so hard) when other pay-for-no-ads attempts have failed (either before or after they launched).

eslaught• 4 years ago

Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access)? As far as I know it still offers two subscription modes, ad and ad-free, and subscriber stats on Wikipedia seem to be trending in a positive direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount%2B

But I think the real issue is this: aside from services that use ads as an explicit differentiator, there is really no reason for a service that charges customers not to also add ads. It's just extra revenue. The only reason I could see for services not wanting to do this is when they want to specifically cultivate a "premium" feel. Cable in the US was/is a classic example: people paid inordinate feels for access, and then also put up with ads on top of it all. And for a large segment of the population, cable was so ubiquitous as to be unthinkable not to subscribe to it.

criddell2• 4 years ago

Are you opposed to having ads plastered on the insides of public transit vehicles?

bumby• 4 years ago

That's a good counterpoint, but to play devils advocate online ads seem to degrade user experience more than a static advert. Seeing a printed ad on the side of a bus doesn't make more hassle or slow me from getting from Point-A to Point-B while online pop-ups do.

blooalien• 4 years ago

Do those ads at all block/interfere with my ability to ride the bus/train? Do they use up (steal) my (artificially) limited public transit mileage (bandwidth/data-cap)? Do those ads track my bus/train trip and sell that info to other transit businesses? There's a pretty significant difference between those passive ads one sees (or ignores) on a bus or train and the sort of constant abusive behaviors we see from Internet advertisers.

dontlaugh• 4 years ago

I am.

bombcar2• 4 years ago

I’d rather they didn’t exist and I feel public transit shouldn’t be dependent on the whims of advertisers.

airstrike3• 4 years ago

I am, actually. I absolutely love what the Clean City law did to Sao Paulo

jameshart• 4 years ago

Actually probably makes less than zero sense.

If a customer is using an ad blocker, and they're on your site spending money, then they got to your site without you having to pay anyone for their traffic. They're already higher margin than a customer who you'll have to pay a conversion fee for if they make an attributable purchase on your site.

jasonlingx• 4 years ago

In the article, a Wizz Air rep explained it’s meant to charge bots and other automations for booking, but is catching users who use ad blockers as a false positive.

vachina• 4 years ago

Ad blockers blocks ads, it does not block bot detection scripts. Even if ad blockers did block bot detection, all the bot operator have to do is… not run any ad blockers on their puppets?

Wizz Air’s explanation smells like bs.

NotYourLawyer• 4 years ago

The general concept sounds great, but it never lasts. Even if you’re paying for a service, the company will eventually realize they’re leaving money on the table not showing you ads.

MereInterest5• 4 years ago

Which is why ads being introduced to a product in any form is a sign to start looking for alternatives. It may not impact your tier yet, but it's only a matter of time before an executive thinks that enabling ads on all tiers is free money. They've already done all the actual work of integrating with an advertising network, and the only thing left is flipping the switch.

helsinkiandrew2• 4 years ago

But if I'm already paying for the service (in this case, the airline ticket) why are you trying to show me ads? This makes absolutely zero sense

Personally I find ads on company/commercial websites make the company look very cheap and untrustworthy.

But I'm guessing your purchase of an airline ticket, means that hotels, car rentals and other ads for things in the city you're visiting are far more effective, clickable and profitable.

Hotel affiliate schemes can pay anything from 2-15%. You don't need many of those for hundred dollar hotel bookings to make it more profitable than the actual flight alone.

petre3• 4 years ago

make the company look very cheap and untrustworthy

Which WizzAir is. They reschedule or cancel flights all the time, mentioned that you needed a negative covid test during the pandemic and requested a PCR test for boarding, they charge for seats and monetize just about everything. During the flight there's a frenzy of commecrial activity which reminds me of Moroccan bazaars.

dehrmann2• 4 years ago

Isn't this what we've been asking for? They either make $10 selling you info to marketers or you pay extra? And this is an ultra low-cost carrier. It's almost expected.

josephcsible• 4 years ago

No, we've been asking for a choice between seeing ads or paying. This is both seeing ads and paying. It'd only be what we asked for if people who didn't use adblockers got their plane tickets for free.

klabb32• 4 years ago

Adblockers are also used to prevent tracking. You can be opposed to tracking without being opposed to ads and vice versa.

jacquesm9• 4 years ago

No, it is entirely unexpected and labeled in a misleading way. If they had opened with 'we are going to charge you $10 extra if you don't disable your adblocker' that would be one thing (that would likely piss off a lot of people but at least it would be above board).

wumpus• 4 years ago

The ad revenue is worth pennies, and the "choice" of using an adblocker vs paying 10 pounds extra is pretty invisible.

Neither of these are what anyone asked for.

dehrmann2• 4 years ago

The ad revenue is worth pennies

I think retargeting makes it worth a lot more. Airfare is low-margin, but hotels are much higher margin. I could see knowing you're traveling to X be surprisingly valuable because you can show users targeted hotel ads when they're likely looking for hotels.

jonnycomputer• 4 years ago

How about this. You land on the site, and there is a popup that says, "If you allow us to show you ads while you're shopping, we'll give you l10 off the ticket price!"

ninefathom2• 4 years ago

When I got down to Wizz Air's statement about "bugs in adblockers" making browsers "act unexpectedly" thereby triggering the robot detection code, I was reminded of the robot detection functionality in a very common enterprise WAF middle-box that injects background JavaScript on the page to detect bots. The code supposedly produced no user-visible change but would participate in some SOAP challenge/response fluff.

We ended up never deploying it because the false positive rate was absurdly high- on the order of 38% or so- with no tuning options available (short of falling back to a captcha). Having said that, I'd expect that this is a very common practice. I also suspect that blaming the ad blockers for lazy middle-box usage (if indeed that's what this particular case proves to be) is _not_ going to age well.

jacquesm9• 4 years ago

That's pretty close to an admission of incompetence.

unethical_ban• 4 years ago

You might say the WAF was Imperva-ious.

I remember an instance where Lowe's website was broken on the corporate network. Our proxy re-arranged the order of HTTP content headers from the site, and Akamai took it as malicious behavior.

ninefathom2• 4 years ago

Not quite, but I've used that one before as well. I suspect many of them offer similar(ly naïve) functionality.

capitainenemo6• 4 years ago

Lowes website has been 100% broken for me ever since I enabled Resist Fingerprinting in Firefox.

I can load exactly one page, but on any navigation or refresh I get:

=====

Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.lowes.com/" on this server. Reference #18.cc69dc17.1661724957.fe4ef4

====

Result, unless I use the profile with fingerprinting enabled, I just have to buy elsewhere.

Drupal.org triggers "prove you're not a robot" every few page navigations with Resist Fingerprinting enabled. Walmart.com too.

Fedex package tracking errors (seemingly due to the API server refusing the connection) if resist fingerprinting is enabled. Amusingly if you use the website help bot and say "track XXXXX" that does work to get some basic information.

squeaky-clean• 4 years ago

I used to work for an airfare marketing company. We would get our 3rd party scripts onto an airlines booking engine to be able to run our own analytics and gather data for ads. We'd mainly collect things like prices, number of available seats, etc, because it turns out airlines can't really give you those answers through an API without it costing too much, so we piggybacked on real customer searches.

Almost no one in the office ran adblockers, which was weird to me. When our analytics traffic dropped by like 50% one day, I was the only one to notice that our domain made it onto EasyList.

I created a GH issue about it, had a productive chat with a maintainer about what data we collected, and which data they thought was PII. If we wanted our domain unblocked we could remove the PII data from the requests, or create a secondary domain that only received the non-PII data.

We were gathering data that was not legally considered PII by something like GDPR, but I understand why an adblocker would be even more strict than the legal minimums. I brought this up with the executives and instead they tried to threaten the maintainers of the block list and tried to educate them on how "technically this isn't personally identifiable data according to this legal spec".

The maintainers stopped responding (rightfully so) and our data collection was forever halved.

jacquesm9• 4 years ago

Is this even legal?

I know the EU has an anti-price discrimination policy based on location, so that probably does not apply, but I don't think they thought anybody would be crazy enough to do this.

Calling it a 'System Surcharge' seems highly misleading and one of the things the EU tends to come down on like a ton of bricks is misleading line items in service charges. If they had called it an 'adblock surcharge' they might get away with it but this seems entirely on purpose.

gpderetta2• 4 years ago

Probably not. Additional mandatory charges on top of the advertised price are not legal. Airlines get fined periodically for these reasons, but they keep on doing it anyway.

Bilal_io• 4 years ago

Perhaps they're not being fined enough.

sleepyhead• 4 years ago

Definitively not.

throwaway290• 4 years ago

The TFA is clear that this is not aimed at adblocker users. It's aimed at booking bots/resellers and there's a false positive.

Nextgrid4• 4 years ago

The EU's enforcement of its regulations/directives is severely lacking (see the GDPR for an example) so in practice it doesn't really matter whether it's legal - the worst that will happen is a slap on the wrist in 5 years' time and if you're lucky, a fine worth a fraction of what the company earned by breaching the regulation.

harvey93• 4 years ago

Airline says it's a 'robot' fee for automated bookings made on the site but that errors mean it sometimes gets applied to human customers.

dspillett• 4 years ago

Actually seems plausible: detecting a bot through differences in interaction, and the and blocker causing a false positive.

Though a bad idea: I can think of no way an ad blocker could trip it that would not mean it could sometimes trip without one due to transient network errors, so it isn't likely to be terribly good at its main job of being a bot detector.

kevinventullo• 4 years ago

Not long before this applies to the flight itself.

“Upgrade your ticket now to experience ads customization on your flight, including features such as seatback video dimming and optional opt-out of feedback surveys!”

geoffeg• 4 years ago

"Upgrade your cabin pressurization now! If more than half the flight pays to upgrade the pilots will lower the cabin altitude from 15,000ft to 8,000ft!"

klabb32• 4 years ago

15000ft is fine by me, why should I have to pay for other passengers pressurization? I thought this was America. I usually hyperventilate the entire flight to get my money's worth of O2.

thedailymail• 4 years ago

After that there will be surcharges for wearing an eyemask or noise-cancelling headphones, to recoup the airline's lost revenues from passengers' less than total engagement with in-flight ads.

acka2• 4 years ago

Black Mirror material indeed.

Mordisquitos• 4 years ago

“Please drink a verification can”

omginternets2• 4 years ago

In the US, they've started playing advertisements at gas pumps. To make matters worse they turn the volume way up.

I have never in my life been so tempted to perform an act of vandalism. Something about this kind of invasion of personal and mental space is absolutely infuriating. I can't even daydream anymore -- even that is up for grabs by advertisers.

ajvpot• 4 years ago

Pro tip: Usually one of the buttons on the side of the screen will mute the video even if the UI element isn't displayed.

macintux2• 4 years ago

I’ve been to a gas station where they have loudspeakers on the building itself and they pepper their customers and everyone else in a few hundred foot radius with noise.

Thankfully it’s been long enough I don’t remember the contents but I think it was for food and drinks inside.

sys_64738• 4 years ago

Do they actually show ads on their webpage when booking flights? I didn't see any conclusion to that.

cantSpellSober• 4 years ago

due to bugs in the AdBlockers, they can make the browser act unexpectedly, and flagged by our security tools as suspicious

I sorta buy this — when browsing in Brave w/uBlock, Captchas appear and fail more often than when browsing without a condom on. I don't think it's a "bug" it's just harder to track you, and it throws off the spam catchers.

adnauseum• 4 years ago

What would happen if I browsed using Lynx?

userbinator4• 4 years ago

Most likely you wouldn't even be able to buy a ticket. Appsites like these are entirely dependent upon JS for their functionality.

On the other hand, I find it ironic that a low-cost airline would use such a complex site; if they are so miserly and minimal with their services that every little bit costs extra, a boring old HTML form seems like the most suited to them.

Tao3300• 4 years ago

I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt since it was anecdotal, but when he got to the "bugs in ad-blockers" explanation, the bullshit was spread a bit to thick for someone innocent.

This is ableist discrimination and it's offensive. I require an ad-blocker to make the web usable with ADHD-PI.

titaniczero2• 4 years ago

Sounds credible to me. Some adblockers and lists block bot detection scripts on purpose, in some cases it could lead the system to flag you as a bot.

What they should do in these cases is to fallback to a captcha or something like that.

madjam0023• 4 years ago

What's interesting is when I booked the tickets, half way through the purchase journey I got a popup saying "Are you human?" with a reCAPTCHA to verify that I was human. They still tried to charge me £10 at the end for a "System Surcharge".

baby2• 4 years ago

Why would an airline have a bot problem?

bwblabs• 4 years ago

Note the Wizz Air anti-bot statement (https://skift.com/2020/08/31/wizz-airs-odd-fee-for-buying-a-...). The "System Surcharge Fee - Applicable to bookings made by automated systems" of € 10 is listed on the Wizz Air website as service fee https://wizzair.com/en-gb/information-and-services/prices-di....

I just opened https://wizzair.com/ with a default uMatrix config (only loading first party *.wizzair.com resources) and it complains straight away:

Are you human?

An unusual activity was detected from your web browsing activity, which may also be done by a robot or “bot”. For this reason it needs to be verified that you are human. Bots are not allowed to use our website/mobile app in order to protect your privacy and provide a reliable user experience.

Some activities may look like they are done by a bot, such as running multiple sessions of the WIZZ website, or performing more than one search in a web browser.

What if I am not a bot? Read on for a solution.

We take many factors into consideration to make sure real website/mobile app users are properly distinguished from bots. We recommend the following:

• Use the latest version of the supported web browsers (Chrome, Firefox);

• Don’t use your browser in incognito or compatibility mode;

• Don’t use ad blockers as they may conflict with our website’s protection;

• Don’t use anonymizer proxies with botnets to hide your identity;

• Try to book from another device and/or internet connection;

• Use our mobile apps on iOS or Android

Why can bots be harmful?

• Some third parties such as online travel agencies use bots. If you book your WIZZ ticket through their websites, we may not be able to contact you about possible flight disruptions or any relevant changes, and they may also apply additional fees on the top of the ticket price;

• Bots can overload our servers, slowing them down for our real customers.

If you are using a bot, please note that:

• By using automation tools on our website or mobile application, you are violating their terms of use.

• As per these terms, we have the right to detect and block your activity and cancel any booking you make via these channels.

• To provide the best service to our customers, bots can still access the Flight-Search capabilities, but we reserve the right to discontinue or block bot users even from Flight-Search, especially if over-use is detected;

• If you would like to show our flights in your inventory, please contact us beforehand and make sure users are redirected to wizzair.com when they are ready to make their booking. You can also use a deep link to the selected flight.

Nextgrid4• 4 years ago

we may not be able to contact you about possible flight disruptions or any relevant changes

Translation: we can't spam you and we're not happy about it.

aendruk3• 4 years ago

Misleading title; more accurate would be “Surcharge intended for automated scrapers is accidentally applied to customers who use ad blockers”

Still stupid, but a different kind.

jacurtis• 4 years ago

Correct. This is a bug.

In the low-cost airline business, your competitive advantage is being the cheapest. Everyone is racing to the bottom. Stripping out features in order to offer a few dollars more off your tickets than your other low cost competitors. The competitors are usually scraping each others' sites to see what the lowest prices are so they can beat it by being cheaper on particular flight routes or dates.

So I think what was actually happening here is that Whizz was trying to control that by raising their price $10 for the scraper bots. The competitors would now scrape Whizz and see a higher price than Whizz actually had and would lower their price to that and stop. Customers who compare all the low cost airlines (most low cost flyers will do that already) will see Whizz is always a little cheaper and purchase from them. Whizz also ends up creating an artificially higher floor (which means more profits instead of racing prices lower).

The problem, is that in the process of Whizz's website trying to determine scraper bots from normal users, a bug in that detection method lead real users with ad blockers from being treated like scraper bots and seeing the higher fee.

This is a bug not a feature.

madjam0023• 4 years ago

If this is intentional to throw off price scraper bots, why is the price only raised £10 on the final screen of checkout when the card details form is shown, after entering personal details, creating an account, entering address, going through seat selection, insurance, car rental, etc. Not to mention a CAPTCHA is filled out during checkout anyway, so they know the user is likely to not be a bot.

The price stays at e.g £100 from the point of searching for flights, all the way through checkout until scrolling down to the card details form, at which point it is discretely raised to £110.

cavisne• 4 years ago

Rather than for scrapers I suspect this is for booking aggregators.

Wizz and other low cost airlines try and avoid these aggregators as they charge huge commissions and can keep them by threatening to take away a chunk of bookings, Wizz even mentions this on page 4 of their annual report.

This is probably to prevent any of these aggregators building a manual integration to enable booking, then hitting them up later for a commission once they have captured a share of bookings (similar to the strategies Postmates etc took at the start).

punkspider• 4 years ago

Almost every time I refresh the price changes a little. Is this normal?

  Video: https://i.imgur.com/C33FXlc.mp4

PaulHoule• 4 years ago

It surprises me that they charge $10 to a suspected bot instead of blocking it.

smcl2• 4 years ago

Wizz Air are on the rocks and should be avoided unless you really like to gamble. There have been a few flights cancelled at very last minute - one group I know were halfway through the ~10 of them checking in when they learned their flight was cancelled (on their way to a wedding). There was also a famous case this summer of a flight being cancelled after everyone had already boarded and the plane was on the runway.

Don't bother, even if your ticket is 50 EUR cheaper it's not worth the risk.

ProZsolt• 4 years ago

Usually it's not just 50 EUR cheaper, but a few hundreds EUR cheaper.

Is it worth the risk? It depends. I use it regularly to visit friends and family back in my home country. Usually not a big deal if it gets cancelled. If I have something important to do I flew out a few days early and sped that time with my family.

smcl2• 4 years ago

A few hundred Euro cheaper than a flagship carrier? Eh maybe. A few hundred Euro cheaper than other (often not great but still more reliable) budget carriers like EasyJet and Ryanair? That'd be very rare, and likely only in teaser/promo fares that are only available in extremely limited quantity and which can go either way

ytdytvhxgydvhh• 4 years ago

All sorts of price discrimination in the travel industry. Expedia has been advertising lower prices in their app, but at least they’re upfront about it? I dunno, but it’s annoying because you know it means “we can sell the additional data we gather if you have our app installed”.

can16358p• 4 years ago

Plausible deniability at its finest. While it could really be a robot filter indeed, the airline seems to be okay with charging customers if they can't show ads to them.

Shady, but also kind of fair TBH.

userbinator4• 4 years ago

The first thing that came to mind when reading the title is "how do they detect? how can we crack it?" Much like anti-anti-debugging is a thing, perhaps adblockers also need to have anti-anti-adblock features.

...but things like this are why "remote attestation" and its ilk should be our biggest concern, because they can use such technologies to deny or distinguish anyone not using the --- no doubt already narrow and increasingly narrowing --- "supported" or "compliant" hardware and software.

abliefern• 4 years ago

Adblockers do that already. uBlock has special filter lists for that purpose.

IncRnd2• 4 years ago

"The use of automations for booking (robots) require additional hosting efforts and for such activities, Wizz Air applies a system surcharge fee", Wizz Air explained to Skift on the issue.

We know that is only superficially true. Yes, automation requires additional hosting resources in regards to the website, but automation also lowers the costs incurred by the PoS (Point of Sale). It costs more to pay a person to sell tickets, and their queue of simultaneous sales is far shorter.

initplus• 4 years ago

Air ticket pricing is already extremely opaque, the most surprising part of this is that it is listed as a seperate surcharge rather than being silently factored into the ticket price.

baby2• 4 years ago

There really needs to be a consumer law to ban hidden fees... Without that they will continue to exist.

For example, I can browse airbnb on the French website, or the australian website, and I get the real total price. But if I browse on the American website I get a fake price (which can be much much lower than the real price).

Google flight is pretty good as it shows "estimated prices" and not fake prices.

analog31• 4 years ago

Is there a way to turn on ads temporarily without the privacy and security risks?

Nextgrid4• 4 years ago

Using a one-off private session for that booking would at least limit the information collected by the ads to what you've typed in that session plus a browser fingerprint and IP address. You can throw off browser fingerprinting by using using a separate browser, and the IP by using a VPN or some other, shared IP address (tethering off your cell phone if your carrier is IPv4-only).

nigerian1981• 4 years ago

Recently named worst airline for UK departing flight delays so just another reason to avoid them [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/29/wizz-air-na...

durnygbur• 4 years ago

Yup, was booking a flight few weeks ago and a "service fee" of 200PLN/42EUR was added in some iterations while I was researching.

AdBlockers are not explicitly forbidden, nor triggering our protection to be detected as a robot. But in a very rare situation, due to bugs in the AdBlockers, they can make the browser act unexpectedly, and flagged by our security tools as suspicious

None of this, Wizzair and your asshole IT contractors. You are incompetent and abusive.

Markoff2• 4 years ago

Don't ever fly with WizzAir, my experience this summer:

flight cancelled 3.5 hours prior departure on our way to airport (I booked accommodation with free cancellation 24h prior checkin anticipating this, but didn't expect they are such aholes they won't give me at least 1 day notice, so would lose all paid accommodation money for 2.5 weeks if didn't arrived), no replacement flight offered (unless you call flight 7 days later replacement), because they offer only own replacement flights (when you reach their Russian/Hungarian barely English speaking hotline after one hour waiting on call) and won't help you get another flight, immediately same day applied for EC compensation (while buying pricey ticket for next day with different airline, luckily I was prepared forthe worst case scenario so still chose the cheaper one and not the one which should be actually covered by EC compensation).

After 30 days EC compensation request (4*250=1000EUR) denied because "extraordinary circumstance", though there was no strike, no bad weather, just their own issues, which is not extraordinary circumstance they don't have plans in case they have issues with airplanes, just their own incompetence.

After their rejection now passed my claim to Czech Civil aviation authority (CAA.cz), as last resort will try some claims company (they take ~30% cut if successful, nothing if no success), worst case losing ~400EUR thanks to Wizzair incompetence, which just cost me lot of money and trouble.

They refused to provide me replacement flight within reasonable time (7 days later is not reasonable time), they refunded me not even half of the ticket I didn't use because of their cancellation (like 180EUR instead 230EUR), they refused to refund me EC compensation I am entitled to and because of more expensive flight to different city I arrived to my destination one day later combined with 6.5 hours bus drive instead direct flight.

Don't EVER give money to these cheaters, I wished they would get their license removed at least in Czechia.

Don't think EC compensation system will help you in any way with scummy airlines.

n4r9• 4 years ago

Huh, that's in stark contrast to my experience with them this summer. Had a flight delayed by several hours and was notified by text message only about 10 hours in advance. This messed up our plans and we had to book a different hotel while waiting in the airport. We submitted a compensation claim expecting we'd get nothing because the delays were partly due to a strike by air traffic control at the destination. To our surprise they approved the compensation and - admittedly quite slowly - have now confirmed a £220 refund for each ticket.

It sounds like you've had a bad experience and potentially like EU laws are not being applied effectively in Czechia. Based on your description you should be owed EU compensation and I'm surprised there's no escalation process that doesn't cost you money. Hope it works out for you.

Markoff2• 4 years ago

This has nothing to do with Czechia, it's decided by Wizzair in Hungary ignoring legitimate claims (and I am not the only one, I was just reading about this article last week even court in Hungary is now investigating the for failure to provide assistance/compensation for delayed/cancelled flights), unless you mean by "not being applied effectively in Czechia " discriminating people flying from Czechia thinking they will bend and won't be protected by authorities/lawyers, which I think is the thing considering your experience, if you flew from UK, where you have Money Claim Online site (actually I used similar site of Czech CAA, will see how that works).

https://www.latestly.com/agency-news/world-news-hungarys-gov...

https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g1-d8729187-r779...

mastazi• 4 years ago

"we recommend to turn off AdBlockers in case of any issues"

this is the web-era equivalent of "we recommend you turn off the antivirus during installation" that some of us might remember from the old days

koksik202• 4 years ago

I remember using vpn for wizz air bookings as flight I looked at increased 40euro with second search, then I cleared caches and switched vpn on, sure enough same flight didn’t have 40euro increase anymore. This was around 2011-2012 haven’t used them since then.

helsinkiandrew2• 4 years ago

"Wizz Air earned 56% of its revenue from ancillaries and 44% from ticket sales"

https://simpleflying.com/wizz-air-losses-climb-despite-jump-...

So the actual flight is becoming a loss leader with most profit from selling priority boarding, in-flight food and drink, car hire, hotel affiliate fees and other ad revenue etc.

Wizz Air now charging some travellers a strange extra fee (2020)

Related Stories