This morning, a lot of people on Facebook were sharing articles about insanely cheap flight deals from WOW Air, an Icelandic airline.
The flights advertised on WOW Air's website are *mind-blowingly* cheap.
We're talking $99 from D.C. to Iceland and $149 for San Francisco to Paris.
If the rates seem too good to be true, it's because THEY ARE.
I live in California. A $200 one way ticket to Europe from the west coast (in June no less!) is cheap as hell, so I jumped on it immediately.
I realized very quickly that WOW Air employs a hidden fee structure meant to trick you into thinking you're getting a great deal. This means you end up paying more for every feature.
Let's take a look at the $199 one-way flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt.
The return flight? NOT CHEAP. The $199 deal is valid for just one way, and nothing was more affordable than $400 coming back to San Francisco.
There were also very few return flight options for the routes I looked at.
Carry ons? NOT FREE. *Any* carry on luggage heavier than 11 pounds will cost you $57 each way, while checked in luggage (44 pound max) is $76.
Seats? DEFINITELY not included. Every seat comes with a price attached to it.
You can end up spending nearly $1,000 on a flight that you thought was just going to cost a couple hundred.
Let this be a lesson to all: beware of hidden and ancillary fees, travelers!
