Wizz Air's Bumpy Journey Back From Abu Dhabi

Ryanair's Michael O'Leary likes to argue that Wizz might not make it. But Wizz's chief commercial officer says his airline can turn things around.

Dear readers,

If only Wizz Air executives had listened to their nemesis, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, who spent years gleefully suggesting that Wizz’s Abu Dhabi joint venture would fail. Perhaps O’Leary’s bombastic rhetoric was inappropriate, but his message to Wizz was accurate: ULCCs typically succeed when they fly packed airplanes on short stage lengths and turn airplanes quickly to leverage their cost advantage.

Unfortunately, Wizz chose a different path with its 2019 joint venture with the Abu Dhabi Developmental Holding Company. The sovereign investor wanted a low-cost option to connect Abu Dhabi with Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, both to bring in tourists and to make it easier for laborers to travel back and forth. Meanwhile, Wizz wanted entry into a market where it (presumably) would have less risk, since it only owned 49 percent of Wizz Air Abu Dhabi.

I don’t think you need as much experience as O’Leary to ask how this airline, which began flying in January 2021, would be a good idea. Long flights to Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa always were going to challenge the ULCC model, and while it’s true that passengers tend to find cheap fares, the Wizz brand wasn’t (and probably still isn’t) well known in the Middle East.

With little going right, Wizz Air Abu Dhabi closed Sept. 1. When they ended the 12-aircraft operation, executives blamed several challenges they had not expected, including high maintenance costs, engine issues, operational reliability problems, and government restrictions on which routes it could fly.¹

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that shutting down the airline was a good idea. Six months later, Israel and the United States attacked Iran, and Iran retaliated in part by targeting the UAE with missile and drone attacks. By then, only about 4.7 percent of Wizz’s capacity flew to the Middle East, mainly on longer hauls from European bases to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and Jordan.

“A lot of people say, ‘You look really smart,’” Wizz chief commercial officer Ian Malin told me in an interview last month. “Certainly we didn’t know what was going to happen, but one of the reasons for pulling out of that airline … was because every time there was political instability, geopolitical sorts of stuff, the capacity got all messed around.”

I like Malin, and not just because he’s such a loyal listener to The Air Show that he listened to it last year during the Wizz Air Skopje half marathon. I found him candid in discussing Wizz’s recent stumbles, and I appreciated how he led me through his network changes, like bolstering operations in Italy and Eastern Europe. I thought he chose his words carefully only once — when he responded to O’Leary’s very public vendetta against his employer, which goes beyond Abu Dhabi.

“Michael can say all sorts of stuff, and he will,” Malin said. “We don’t really care. We know that there’s a lot of good things he does. He should focus on what he does well and not trying to identify what we do poorly.”

Here are some highlights of my discussion with Malin.