Along with airport crowding and rising prices, the flight subscription has dominated air travel trends over the last year.
While the all-you-can-fly concept first started in the 1980s, it was largely phased out as airlines struggled to bring in profits — in one iconic example, a New York investment banker paid $250,000 for the AAirpass in 1981 and spent the next 25 years flying first class around the world before American Airlines (AAL) cut him off.
DON'T MISS: One Major Airline Says Fly As Much As You Want for $49 A Month
More than 40 years later since the AAirpass, Alaska Airlines (ALK) became the first to test a "Flight Pass" in which travelers can take six, 12, or 24 nonstop flights a year to a select number of the airline's West Coast destinations. The price ranges from $49 a month for the most restricted option to $189 for the most expansive.
WizzAir
This Is The Latest Budget Airline Testing A Flight Subscription
While requiring a larger upfront payment, Denver-based Frontier Airlines (FRON) came closer to a truly unlimited pass with the GoWild! subscription.
For $1,999 a year, travelers can book unlimited flights on 300 days of the year that fall outside some of the most popular travel periods. The program was so popular that Frontier expanded it to include different versions — one for children with accompanying guardians and one that only lasts the summer.
The latest low-cost airline to experiment with a flight subscription is the Budapest-based Wizz Air (WZZAF) .
The Hungarian budget airline is known for shuttling people between nearby European cities and, in doing so, competes with other low-cost carriers like EasyJet (EJTTF) and Ryanair (RYAOF) .
Wizz Air has been expanding fast and now has seat capacity for 52.7 million annual passengers. It also, in mid-April, launched a program called the MultiPass that allows travelers to pay a set monthly fee and book any flights within Italy as well as between Italy and Poland up to five days before departure.
The airline has been scant on details around how many flights one can take and what the program will cost but it was launched after observing increased tourism demand for Italy and from its Polish customers in particular.
Growing Summer Travel Demand Spurs New Programs, Routes
The subscription will be built through Caravelo, the same travel tech company that Alaska Airlines enlisted to create the online platform for Flight Pass, and will be available to customize depending on the specific routes a customer takes most often.
The Wizz Air pass be the first such program in Europe as all of the the flight subscriptions launched in the last two years were based in either the U.S. or Asia.
"After successful payment each month, you will receive token(s) which are redeemable for single or round-trip tickets on the eligible Wizz Air flights," the airline says on its website.
The Wizz Air flight subscription also comes at a time when summer travel demand is expected to reach an all-time high. Flight aggregator website Kayak recently reported a 77% spike in searches for flights between North America and Europe while a dearth of pilots and other airport staff means that airlines have to limit the routes they run.
As a result, airfare to certain European cities has risen anywhere from 17% to 70% from 2022 and various money-saving passes and subscriptions are looking increasingly more attractive.
