WOW Air Cuts More Flights, Offers 50% Off Remaining Ones

Beleaguered WOW Air will lay off more employees and cut more routes, including to Los Angeles and New Delhi. But flights are now on sale…

Icleandic media is reporting that WOW Air laid off 111 permanent employees. Many contractors were also informed their contracts will not be renewed, bringing the effective WOW workforce from 1500 to 1000.

Founder and CEO Skúli Mogensen said:

This is the hardest day in the history of WOW air. We have a great group of people who have worked hard to make WOW air a reality and it’s so sad to be forced to go to this cut. I wish that there was another way, but the fact is that we have to reverse the operation and bring him back to goodness before we can rebuild the structure.

The fleet will drop from 20 to 11 aircraft and the A330s, capable of reaching Los Angeles and New Delhi, will be returned. Flights to Los Angeles end after January 14, 2019 and flights to New Delhi after January 21, 2019. The news also means that flights to Dallas and San Francisco will not return…at least now now.

A Desperate Sale

Meanwhile, WOW is offering a 50% discount on select flights from today through March 31, 2019.

There’s a term for this sort of sale: a fire sale. As WOW seeks to sustain operations, it needs cash to do so. These sales will likely put the Icleadic carrier further in the hole, but provide the infusion of cash necessary to survive until a restructuring plans is finalized.

CONCLUSION

As one person on airliners.net noted, Braniff also had amazing fare sales before it went under. In fact, such sales were deliberately targeted to raise cash even though the carrier knew it would not survive to honor them. Let’s hope the same is not true on WOW Air.