Skift Travel News Blog

Low-cost carrier Wizz Air has launched a flight subscription program, opting for the same platform that Alaska Airlines uses.

The European airline has partnered with Caravelo, a company that builds subscription platforms for airlines. They claim the program, called MultiPass, is a first for Europe.

It will initially be available for six months for the Italian and Polish markets. Passengers will be able to fly domestic Italy and international Poland routes, booking up until five days before departure.

For a fixed monthly fee, the subscribers can choose between one way or round-trip flights, and can also customize their plan with ancillaries.

Caravelo partnered with Alaska Airlines for its Flight Pass in February last year, while Frontier Airlines also recently launched its own, called GoWild!

Barcelona-based Caravelo also raised $3 million in funding in July last year. “In the past year, the industry has finally woken up to the power of subscriptions,” CEO Inaki Uriz said at the time.

For more on subscription models in travel, read Skift’s Megatrends from 2021.

Caravelo, a startup specializing in travel subscription services, said on Monday that it had received approximately $3 million (€3 million) in funding from Banco Sabadell via Sabadell Venture Capital and Inveready Venture Finance.

Caravelo, based in Barcelona, said it had seen revenue from its travel subscription solutions double in the first half of the year.

In the past year, it began helping Alaska Airlines on the back-end with that carrier’s recently launched subscription program.

Since 2018 the startup has run a subscription offering on behalf of Volaris, the Mexican low-cost carrier. The Volaris VPass lets more than 30,000 consumers fly within Mexico once a month, paying only taxes when you book in return. Plans vary, but the monthly subscription for round-trip tickets is about $35 (699 Mexican pesos) a month. Volaris’ VPass recently reported a 95 percent increase in users, year-over-year, as well as revenue that is already 105 percent above pre-pandemic levels.

“In the past year, the industry has finally woken up to the power of subscriptions,” said CEO Iñaki Uriz. “We have seen a marked increase in the number of airlines that are working with us to build subscription programs. We are expecting to make new announcements before the end of the year, including the launch of a new type of subscription product by a large carrier in Latin America.”