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It was “Survivor: Airport Edition.”
A passenger suffered a “panic attack” after a Wizz Air cancellation left flyers stranded at the airport for 22 hours with nothing but two chocolate bars for sustenance.
“Only two snacks within 24 hours. I think that’s absolutely ridiculous,” Sandra Czaranecka, 33, told Kennedy News and Media while recounting the “shocking” meal ordeal.
The traveler had been slated to fly from London, UK, to Warsaw, Poland, on Dec. 7 to visit family, when her flight was delayed due to powerful winds.
“We got on board, no problem, and then they told us the wind was too strong to fly,” Czaranecka recalled. “Everyone was quite understanding because we knew there were weather issues, so we were expecting that there might be delays or cancellations.”
Her premonition proved correct as, shortly thereafter, crewmembers let the passengers “board the plane and held us there for four hours,” she recounted.
After a grueling three hours on the ground, passengers were given a chocolate bar and water to tide them over.
“If you wanted anything else, they were, like, ‘Oh, you have to pay for it,’” lamented Czaranecka, adding that the passengers were eventually forced to deplane because the aircraft couldn’t fly.
The flight kept getting postponed until it was eventually canceled at 10 p.m., trapping passengers at the flight hub.
“They just left us stranded at the airport,” recalled Czaranecka. “I literally had a panic attack. I was so tired at this stage. I didn’t know what to do.”
To exacerbate matters, the flyers had nothing to eat except a Balaton Bumm chocolate bar and a Marzipan Stollenfruit bread — barely 20% of the 2,000 calories adults are suggested to consume each day.
“They gave us a chocolate bar and then they gave us something from the trolley which was another sort of chocolate bar — and that was it,” spluttered Czaranecka.
That was just the start of “22 hours of absolute horror,” she said. She claimed that the links the company sent to book hotels were nonfunctional and eventually “crashed” due to the number of people clicking on them, forcing flyers to find their own lodging.
“They (Wizz Air employees) literally gave zero f–ks,” said Czaranecka. “There was no one from Wizz Air to advise on anything.”
Fed up with waiting as it was already midnight, the weary Czaranecka decided to bite the bullet and drop $250 on a hotel, food and transportation. She said other passengers couldn’t afford to follow suit and were forced to stay at the airport and subsist on the aforementioned starvation rations.
However, she and her friends were only at the hotel for four hours when Wizz Air staffers informed them that their flight had been rescheduled.
When they returned to the airport the next day, they noticed that their stranded brethren hadn’t eaten anything but the two candy bars for 22 hours, evoking something out of the 2004 Tom Hanks film “The Terminal.”
“We started finding out people’s stories and some people slept there on the floor and one girl slept in the prayer room,” recalled Czaranecka. “One lady had no money so she literally hadn’t eaten during that time.”
She added, “I’ve been flying for 11 years all around the world and I’ve never seen something like that.”
The passengers finally departed at 1:30 p.m. that day — nearly a day after their initial flight was slated to depart.
While the bedraggled traveler acknowledged that the weather delay wasn’t Wizz Air’s fault, she declared that it wasn’t fair for them to “cancel the flight at the last minute” and subsequently not “provide people with some basic essentials.”
Czaranecka, who regularly uses Wizz Air to visit family because of the convenience and affordability, said she found the situation particularly appalling as the budget carrier is normally “so good.”
She claimed that she finally had her expenses refunded by the airline, but has yet to receive any compensation.
A Wizz Air spokesperson has since weighed in on the ordeal, seemingly dismissing complaints.
“As a result of multiple flight cancellations, securing hotel accommodation for customers was more difficult than usual,” a spokesperson said. “However, Wizz Air fulfilled all its obligations to passengers by providing food, accommodation and transfers.”
As for Czaranecka’s compensation request, the representative cited regulations stipulating that “Wizz Air is not obliged to provide further compensation if the cancellation is due to extraordinary circumstances beyond reasonable control, including extreme weather.”
They noted that she’d been reimbursed for the hotel booking she made herself.
“We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused any of our passengers during this period, and stress that the safety of our passengers, crew and aircraft is our utmost priority,” they said.
