Wizz Air’s low-cost flights have been a big hit with budget-conscious travelers since the Hungarian-based airline started doing business in Ukraine nearly two years ago. Its competitors, however, are not so thrilled with Wizz Air’s success in flying customers cheaply to destinations in Europe and within Ukraine.
But was one of them upset enough to launch a smear campaign on the eve of the Christmas holidays? Wizz Air is suggesting as much. The airline is crying foul that a simple canceled flight in England generated a wildly inaccurate PR attack followed by official talk of pushing the airlines out of the Ukrainian market.
“We find it deeply disappointing that it might be in somebody’s interest to damage Wizz Air’s reputation, the only low-cost airline that made a longstanding commitment to the Ukrainian public and that offers the lowest fares, highest customer service standards and brand new Airbus A320 [planes],” said Natalia Kazmer, a Wizz Air spokeswoman. “We understand that competitors take us as a serious threat to their monopolies, but we refuse to play any other game than that of pure competition for passengers.
“Within the one-and-a-half years that we have been operating on the Ukrainian market, Wizz Air has carried almost 660,000 passengers,” Kazmer said. “In 2009 alone, eight scheduled flights were opened for a current total of 11.”
The airline’s PR troubles began with a dubious media report that rocketed from one Internet site to another, after British police were called to remove an intoxicated Ukrainian passenger from a cancelled Dec. 18 flight, Kazmer said.
The original source of the media attack on Wizz Air was a single, non-sourced report by a Moscow-based web site called Travel.ru.
According to the report, an unnamed passenger on board the aborted Wizz Air flight accused the budget airline of cancelling the flight in order to use the plane for a flight to Poland, thus leaving Ukrainian passengers stranded in Luton, England.
The Dec. 22 Travel.ru report then went on to give this dramatic description of the incident:
“At first, the flight crew tried to smoke the Kyiv passengers out of the plane, opening the doors of the plane wide and causing a draft. They were forced to close the doors after a pregnant woman sitting near the entrance complained. Realizing that none of the passengers was willing to leave the plane, Wizz Air employees called the police, who entered the aircraft with dogs and forced the passengers off. Against particularly non-compliant passengers they used gas, causing the exiting passengers’ eyes to water. One passenger who refused to leave was threatened by the dogs, which had their muzzles removed.”
The trouble is, the account is not true, according to Wizz Air, which supplied an official police report to back up its version. There was no tear gas, the airline said, and no dogs were used in the forcible removal of the one unruly passenger.
The Bedfordshire (Great Britain) police statement gave this account in a Dec. 23 statement: “On Dec. 18, Bedfordshire police responded to an incident of alcohol-fueled disorder on a stationary Wizz Air aircraft. [Officers were] called to assist [the] air crew, who were unable to remove passengers from the plane. During the incident, a passenger was arrested by police and taken into custody, where he subsequently admitted [to] an offense of ‘failing to leave an aircraft on request’ and accepted a caution. While resisting his arrest, the man sustained a minor cut to his forehead.”
By then, however, the sensational Internet report had been seized upon by Ukrtatnafta, the airline’s fuel supplier in Ukraine, as justification for severing business ties with Wizz Air. Top-level Ukrainian politicians quickly piled in, citing the spurious web site account, and threatened to end Wizz Air’s presence in Ukraine.
Kazmer of Wizz Air declined to name the people that the airline thinks are behind the attack. But one trail leads to Ukraine’s powerful Privat Group, which owns lucrative assets such as Privatbank and, more recently, has taken control of Aerosvit, Ukraine’s leading airline.
Timur Novikov, who represents the interests of assets controlled by Privat Group poster boy billionaires Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolubov, denied that the group had anything to do with the attacks. Novikov argued that Privat doesn’t control Aerosvit. “There are several investors who control Aerosvit, and Privat is only one of them,” Novikov added.
Yury Kravets, an attorney for an Odesa-based business association called the Ukrainian Anti-Raider Movement, said he knew nothing of Privat’s ambitions in the airline sector. But Kravets called Privat “the leader” among Ukrainian raiders. “They work all over Ukraine and target top companies, using dodgy court decisions and black PR,” Kravets said. Privat has denied such claims.
An Aerosvit representative at first denied that his company is “officially” owned by the so-called Privat group, but eventually conceded that the airline is controlled by Kolomoisky.
Dmytro Parfenenko, the head of Ukraine’s privatization agency, announced in mid-November that Aerosvit had come under majority control of the Privat Group and Aerosvit chief executive Hryhoriy Hurtoviy. Sources said the rest of the shares are owned by the state (22 percent) and Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk (25 percent).
The Privat Group is also widely reported to control Ukrtatnafta, the leading supplier of jet fuel at Ukraine’s main Boryspil airport, and the supplier that cut off Wizz Air after the cancellation of the flight at Britain’s Luton Airport.
“This was conditioned by Wizz Air employees’ unacceptable and even inappropriate treatment of passengers at Luton Airport, where not only all professional standards were ignored, but essentially human rights were violated,” Ukrtatnafta said in a statement. “Such an incident cannot but invoke shock in a civilized society and, of course, demands an appropriate reaction to this episode. Doubly distressing is that an airline working on the Ukrainian market would allow itself to so roughly treat Ukrainian passengers, instead of protecting their interests.”
Repeated attempts to reach the chief editor of Travel.ru to question the validity of the anonymous source were unsuccessful.
Kazmer of Wizz Air said that 12 of 17 flights from Luton airport were cancelled Dec. 18 due to bad weather. A Wizz Air statement said alternative travel arrangements were made for the passengers, about half of whom were not even Ukrainian citizens.
“We are certain that the scandal taking place in the media over the last couple of days was organized with the goal of blocking the further development and strengthening of Wizz Air’s position on the Ukrainian market,” Wizz Air said in a statement.
Even more disturbing to Wizz Air was the response by top-level Ukrainian politicians.
Lawmaker Bogdan Gubsky of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s parliamentary faction called on the Transport Ministry to cancel Wizz Air’s license, if necessary, in Ukraine. “We must force them to respect Ukraine and its citizens. And the airline that allowed such crude treatment of Ukrainians should be given a licking,” he was quoted by the party’s press service as saying.
Even Foreign Minister Petro Poroshenko joined the parade of knee-jerk reactions, saying: “I am not ruling out that a representative of that company will be invited to a meeting with me, and that Ukraine as a state will come to the necessary conclusions that will guarantee the interests of its citizens and appropriate behavior from representatives of that company with regard to Ukrainian citizens.”
Kazmer, the Wizz Air spokeswoman, said her company was “very surprised that the Foreign Ministry has publicly reacted the way they did based on the totally unfounded media reports.”
In the meantime, Wizz Air has switched from Ukrtatnafta to another fuel supplier.
David Kaminski-Morrow, who handles air transport intelligence for Flight Global, an international weekly aerospace publication, said Wizz Air has successfully taken advantage of low competition in Eastern Europe. However, rather than cutting into other carriers’ business, low-cost airlines often create new passengers among people who previously found it too expensive to fly, according to Kaminski-Morrow.
“There’s only competition if they [the budget airlines] start operating the same routes as established airlines,” he added. And that is what competitors may not like about Wizz Air.
The airline is going head to head with Aerosvit and Ukrainian International Airlines, Ukraine’s two leading airlines, by offering fares to some of the same destinations for a fraction of the cost.
In March of this year, Wizz Air is planning to launch direct flights from Kyiv to Oslo and Hamburg for less than $50, while Aerosvit currently charges several hundred dollars for the same destinations, with stopovers in Riga and Prague.
Kaminski-Morrow said that if budget air carriers such as Wizz Air are forced out of Ukraine, travelers would suffer and pay more. “You are either going to rule out a large part of the passenger market or force people to pay significantly higher for the same service,” he said.
Kyiv Post staff writer John Marone can be reached at [email protected].
