Wizz Air: Is ‘All You Can Fly’ Delivering an ‘All You Could Want’ Marketing Strategy?

Last week, Wizz Air announced their unlimited flight offer and I’ll be honest, it’s the first time I had heard of an actual ‘all you can fly’ offer. I know there’s flight passes for discounts, but nothing to the extent of unlimited flight membership.

It seems a great offer for those who can be flexible and work with the limitations (flights must be booked within 3 days of departure, carry on or checked baggage isn’t included, there’s a small, additional flat fee per flight etc.) but their announcement got me thinking about how as a product launch, the concept is working perfectly.

Let’s unpack the key components as to why it seems to be working so well (with some flight-related puns along the way!):

PR and Widespread Awareness

It clearly works from a PR perspective, as the story is going viral across social media, international news titles such as the BBC and Sky News, and business / trade publications such as Business Insider. Good or bad sentiment - Wizz Air and their flight pass are getting noticed.

It’s the type of commercial angle that hits a sweet spot and makes itself relevant to a wide range of personas, so more people qualify for target media lists. Granted, it’s a financial topic around how consumers can spend their money on something we all love - travel - with a well-recognised airline, but we still can’t deny the impact!

Aside from that, this sort of buzz really helps to push down unfavourable stories from the news cycle, such as some of the negative ratings from consumer surveys that they had received across airline rankings a few months prior.

The SEO Potential - Establishing a Foothold with High-Value Search Terms‍

From a search perspective, there’s plenty of potential that could be capitalised on right now - and more for the future.

For example, currently in the UK Wizz Air doesn’t rank in any traffic-driving positions for terms around ‘all you can fly’, ‘unlimited flight pass’ or ‘unlimited flights’ - with this new product we can feasibly expect that to change.

The search volume is decent but not astronomical, with the terms above totalling around 30K English queries per month. And, when you consider all of the potential localised broad variants across the 40+ countries the company operates in, it certainly adds up.

In terms of wider, long-term impact on the search landscape - my theory around this particular cluster of keywords is that the search volumes will inflate over time.

This will happen for two reasons:

1. More people will hear about the promotion and as a by-product start searching for it (this is evidenced by ‘all you can fly’ soaring in interest in the week that followed Wizz’s announcement, according to Google Trends). This could expand the amount of branded terms that draw customers.

2. If Wizz’s promotion takes off then it’s reasonable to expect that others will follow the trend with similar products, and there’s only so many ways to frame unlimited flights when a flight pass already exists separately! So naturally if the industry follows suit, likely so will the search appetite.

Building performance around terms you know will become important as your chosen industry evolves can be incredibly valuable and this is reflected by Frontier Airlines occupying position 1 for ‘unlimited flight pass’ in the UK - despite their ‘Go Wild - All you can fly’ offer only being available to those in the US.

Overall, their Go Wild deal page drives over 55k search traffic and their offer only began in November 2023.

I touched on benefits extending to brand terms earlier and Frontier has evidence of this, with 10k of the aforementioned traffic coming from ‘frontier go wild pass’ and ‘frontier all you can fly’ alone. 

It’s reasonable to expect that they wouldn’t require these rankings without the promotion - nor would they have such high search volumes. For non-branded, they drive over 1k traffic from ‘unlimited flight pass’ and ‘all you can fly pass’ from the page.

Influencer and Social Media Pick-Up

In the PR analysis, we noted the social media pick-up the pass has been receiving once it became viral. 

Countless travel influencers, tips and/or review users have reviewed or pushed the promotion, leading to a collective hundreds of thousands of views in the week since launch.

It’s likely this has been achieved from a mix of targeted product features and influencer marketing, social promotion and subsequent general brand pick up from the PR. Either way, it’s untold extra awareness that will drive interest.

Overall, Wizz Air seem to have landed a winner here when it comes to achieving a holistic marketing push for their new product. It remains to be seen whether ‘all you can fly’ changes the airline landscape forever, but in the short term at least, it's made quite a dent.