The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has criticised Wizz Air for the “high volume” of complaints and delays in paying refunds to passengers.
The CAA’s latest quarterly data found that Hungary-based Wizz was “clearly the worst airline for complaints” to be escalated to the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) scheme or to the regulator’s own complaints team.
There were 811 complaints per million passengers about Wizz Air in the third quarter of the year. Apart from Royal Brunei Airlines, which received 555 complaints per million passengers, all other airlines had less than half as many complaints as Wizz.
The CAA also recently questioned the time Wizz Air was taking to process claims from passengers, and the number of county court judgements (CCJs) which have been found against Wizz Air but remain unpaid.
The authority said it had been “clear” with Wizz Air that this was an “unacceptable way to treat passengers and that it is imperative for the issues to be tackled urgently”.
Anna Bowles, the CAA’s head of consumer policy and enforcement, said: “Passengers have every right to expect their complaints and claims to be resolved quickly and efficiently, and to be treated fairly by airlines.
“The volume of complaints and claims received by ADR in respect of Wizz Air is far higher than those seen for other airlines.
“We have made it clear to Wizz Air that its behaviour is unacceptable and that we expect overdue complaints and claims to be resolved in advance of Christmas.
“Where we have evidence that an airline is letting passengers down, we won’t hesitate to take further action where required.”
Wizz Air said it was “deeply sorry for the inconvenience” caused to its customers and added it was “working hard to put things right and resolve all outstanding claims as quickly as possible”.
“The major disruption we navigated last summer meant that we have been dealing with an unprecedented number of claims. Despite this, 91 per cent of claims have already been processed,” said the airline in a statement.
“We have recently doubled the size of our customer services team and are working continuously to process all outstanding customer claims, Alternative Dispute Resolution claims and settle all county court judgements.
“We are committed to resolving all outstanding claims and resuming our regular processing times as soon as possible.”