Wizzair website problems results in you bidding against yourself when changing flights with WizzFlex

WizzAirCustomer

powerful_Rogue wrote: »

Posting on a forum and sending them the link is not a Letter Before Action.

The second step is not Country Court Claim anyway, the second step is ADR.

powerful_Rogue wrote: »

Do you have proof you attempted this 30 times? Screenshots of the £117 price?

I have some proof. Also this is NOT a criminal case where a defendant can choose to remain silent and just say, OK, prove a case against me. (Even in criminal cases this nowadays does not work as well as in the past, unless you are a policeman.)

powerful_Rogue wrote: »

A court will ask why you did not phone to book as soon as you became aware of the error.

Will court ask? I thought the process in court is adversarial rather than inquisitorial.

In any case if you try once and it does not work it does not mean that something is wrong on their side and i would be foolish to conclude that based on a single trial. I have tried different cards, different browsers, different computers. I observed how seats I actually failed to reserve are taken out of circulation. The conclusions I have drawn could not be made by trying once or twice.

Also I might add that a a couple of hours after my suffering the price on the site for new tickets had dropped down - another confirmation that it is my failed attempts that hiked price. In effect due to their errors I was bidding against myself.

WizzAirCustomer

bradders1983 wrote: »

Im sorry but no court in the land is going to accept this as a reasonable way of dealing with the issue before taking it to the courts.

Maybe type out a letter and mail it to them recorded post? :j

Just to reiterate the next step after this is ADR. The ADR decision is not binding on me if I choose not to accept it. So CC Claim wold only be issued after ADR, and surely after [STRIKE]another[/STRIKE] a proper Letter Before Action. (Proper in a sense that it would be sent recorded to Head Office and their UK base at Luton Airport, the content would be pretty similar to the above with additional stress on the fact that the next step is CC Claim issuance.)

jpsartre

WizzAirCustomer wrote: »

If it goes to court hearing Wizzair will have to provide an explanation.

Here's an explanation. For whatever technical reason, you couldn't make the change online. By the time you got around to doing it over the phone, the fare had increased £60. You were less than a week from your new travel date, even waiting a day can result in a much higher fare.



Here's another explanation. You tried to change the itineary of three passengers 30 times, thereby causing the system to erroneously think that 90 seats had been booked and this is what pushed the fare up. So not only does this require that there were there at least 90 unsold seats six days before departure on a 180-230 seat plane, "selling" those seats only caused the fare to increase by £60.



Obviously you've made up your mind as to what happened but I dare say any other reasonable person (including adjudicators at AviationADR and small claims court judges) will deem the former explanation exceedingly more plausible than the latter.



That's not, by the way, to say you have no claim. You can certainly make the case that technical issues in Wizzair's end meant that you ultimatetely ended up paying more than you should have paid. But if you want to make a credible case to AviationADR or in small claims court, you'll be better off removing the tinfoil hat and leaving out the absurd conspiracy theories.

WizzAirCustomer

jpsartre wrote: »

Here's an explanation. For whatever technical reason, you couldn't make the change online. By the time you got around to doing it over the phone, the fare had increased £60. You were less than a week from your new travel date, even waiting a day can result in a much higher fare.



Here's another explanation. You tried to change the itineary of three passengers 30 times, thereby causing the system to erroneously think that 90 seats had been booked and this is what pushed the fare up. So not only does this require that there were there at least 90 unsold seats six days before departure on a 180-230 seat plane, "selling" those seats only caused the fare to increase by £60.



Obviously you've made up your mind as to what happened but I dare say any other reasonable person (including adjudicators at AviationADR and small claims court judges) will deem the former explanation exceedingly more plausible than the latter.



That's not, by the way, to say you have no claim. You can certainly make the case that technical issues in Wizzair's end meant that you ultimatetely ended up paying more than you should have paid. But if you want to make a credible case to AviationADR or in small claims court, you'll be better off removing the tinfoil hat and leaving out the absurd conspiracy theories.

What conspiracy theories?

I do not allege that Wizzair deliberately set up their systems to achieve this effect. But I have reasons to believe that the effect of THEIR system issues is that I was effectively bidding against myself.

Your assertion that 30 attempts times 3 people under my theory requires 90 empty seats is extreme. I believe after a certain amount of time or after human intervention seats were getting released. I know that because say I would try to book seat 30F, I would not see it for the next few attempts but later on I would see it again as available.

Also in support of my theory is that when I checked prices couple of hours after finally booking the change over the phone they were right down to the level they were before I started booking. So presumingly by that time erroneously blocked seats became again available, and even the fact that by that time I had booked three more seats on the flight did not drive up the price.

In any case Wizzair are the ones in the position to clarify the matters. If they choose to just "remain silent" it will be just my word against nothing - they just as well might pay up without allowing it to get to court. It will not be a criminal rial, it will be a County Court trial, if it gets to that.

What I think definitely is not an explanation is that each one of my 30 or so attempts was frustrated by someone actually buying a ticket during each of my attempts pushing the price higher during each attempt. They did claim they had a promotion so tickets were selling fast BUT surely not that fast. Especially that to fly from Larnaca you need to be first in Larnaca and the flight from Larnaca was just 6 days from the date of booking.

cubegame

Just so you know, if you try the court route you will almost certainly be adding the court fee to your losses.

Why didn't you phone them in the first place? I've made a change with Wizzair on the phone when the website wasn't working and they waive the fees without hesitation. Most airlines will.

jpsartre

WizzAirCustomer wrote: »

I do not allege that Wizzair deliberately set up their systems to achieve this effect.

I realize this. The thing is, it doesn't make one difference to your claim whether things are as you say or not. What you should be focusing is the argument that Wizzair's technical issues ultimately caused you to pay more for your tickets than you would have paid had you been able to make the change straight away. Whether this because you ended up "bidding against yourself" or because other people booked seats and pushed the price up is entirely irrelevant. So why even focus on it?

CKhalvashi

cubegame wrote: »

Just so you know, if you try the court route you will almost certainly be adding the court fee to your losses.

Why didn't you phone them in the first place? I've made a change with Wizzair on the phone when the website wasn't working and they waive the fees without hesitation. Most airlines will.

Agreed re phoning.

I had to call them to change something for a flight in July as a result of human error (on my part) and the website wasn’t working.

A 5 minute call later and with no additional fees the change was made.

I use Wizz a lot for work due to their niche network suiting my needs (Kutaisi, Lviv etc) and have never found them to be a problem, either in customer service or reasonableness.

I’d also be interested to see how you qualify your losses for half a day you wouldn’t have been working at £300. Good luck with that.........

WizzAirCustomer

jpsartre wrote: »

I realize this. The thing is, it doesn't make one difference to your claim whether things are as you say or not. What you should be focusing is the argument that Wizzair's technical issues ultimately caused you to pay more for your tickets than you would have paid had you been able to make the change straight away. Whether this because you ended up "bidding against yourself" or because other people booked seats and pushed the price up is entirely irrelevant. So why even focus on it?

If during each one of those attempts someone actually bought a seat and this was the real reason why I encountered the problems then, actually, I would not be pursuing this or at the very least my case would be much weaker.

WizzAirCustomer

CKhalvashi wrote: »

Agreed re phoning.

I had to call them to change something for a flight in July as a result of human error (on my part) and the website wasn’t working.

A 5 minute call later and with no additional fees the change was made.

There are different modes of "not working". I suspect in your case it was clear and obvious it was not working such as being down. That is by far not the worst case scenario.

In my case it was not working but not so obviously. In fact even after several hours of trying and several calls to them THEY DID NOT wave the fee. The fact they refused to wave the fee even after several hours of trying kind of kills the argument "should have called them earlier".

Then a day later when actually selecting the seat when I actually described the problem along the lines above that so many criticized - they actually waved the fee for selecting the seats on the phone.

WizzAirCustomer

CKhalvashi wrote: »

I’d also be interested to see how you qualify your losses for half a day you wouldn’t have been working at £300. Good luck with that.........

Unfortunately, normally, in English law it is difficult to sue for lost time especially where can not directly link it to lost earnings.

Holidays, however, is an exception as there is an alternative quantum to use for quantifying such losses - the cost I incurred to be there. So if I actually paid say EUR500 to be there then one day's loss of enjoyment can be valued at EUR500 without having to prove that I lost earnings of EUR500.