Wow launches $99 one-way fares from SFO-Iceland, $199 to Europe





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less Skuli Mogensen, CEO of WOW air, is launching service from SFO to Iceland and European countries by around summer 2016 in San Francisco, California, as he talks about his airline on Monday, January 11, 2015. Skuli Mogensen, CEO of WOW air, is launching service from SFO to Iceland and European countries by around summer 2016 in San Francisco, California, as he talks about his airline on Monday, January 11, 2015. ... more Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 27 Caption Close Wow launches $99 one-way fares from SFO-Iceland, $199 to Europe 1 / 27 Back to Gallery

UPDATE: See new information at end of story .

Wow Air will begin offering flights June 10 from San Francisco International Airport to Iceland for as little as $99 each way and to many European cities, with a stop in Iceland, starting at $199 each way.

Tickets will go on sale at 6 a.m. Pacific time Tuesday, but the carrier, based in Reykjavik, will sell only 10 percent of seats on certain flights at those lowest fares. And like most low-fare, bare-bones carriers, Wow will charge fees for almost everything but a small personal carry-on item weighing 11 pounds or less.

Between SFO and Europe, passengers will pay $114 round-trip to carry on a bag weighing more than 11 and up to 26 pounds, and $152 round trip to check a bag. Many U.S. carriers allow one free carry-on and one free checked bag on international flights, along with free meals and house wine and beer. On Wow, food and beverages, including soft drinks, are extra.

To get the lowest fares, Wow passengers generally will need to book online quickly and be willing to travel during off-peak periods, said Skúli Mogensen, Wow’s founder and chief executive. Passengers who are less nimble and flexible should still be able to find seats for $250 to $299 each way to Europe, said Mogensen, a native of Iceland who ran a dot-com in San Francisco in the late 1990s.

Wow will have five departures weekly from SFO. Starting June 16, it will offer four flights weekly from Los Angeles International. The only other U.S. cities it serves are Boston and Washington. It will add service from Toronto and Montreal this spring.

Wow’s European-bound passengers can get a stopover in Iceland, which is quickly becoming a tourist destination, for about an extra $50 or so in airport fees.

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Although there are many low-fare carriers operating within the United States and Europe — such as Spirit Airlines and Ryanair, respectively — only a few fly long-haul routes. The leader, and Wow’s main competition, is Norwegian, a publicly held airline from Oslo that launched service in Oakland in 2014.

Wow will expand its fleet of six purple Airbus 330s to 10 by year end. Each plane holds 350 passengers in all-economy seating, although about 100 seats will have extra legroom for an additional fee. Seat pitch — the distance from any point on one seat to the same point on the seat in front of or behind it — will range from 30 to 35 inches.

If you want to reserve a seat, it will cost you extra. From SFO to Europe, the round-trip fee is $20 for a rear seat, $24 for a seat in the front and $96 for a 35-inch seat.

Ed Perkins, a contributing editor to Smartertravel.com, suspects that Wow’s seating “is not going to be an awful lot worse than economy class on anybody else. United usually says they are 31 (inches) or better. The bottom line is, the term comfortable economy seat is an oxymoron,” he said.

A bigger problem is that fee mania “is killing off the huge benefit the Internet first provided,” he said. When someone is looking up flights to Frankfurt, for example, one screen doesn’t give comprehensive fares from all airlines. “Now with the different fee packages, Expedia can no longer provide an honest comparison.”

Wow will fly from SFO to Northern European countries year round and to Southern European ones during the summer. With only five flights per week initially, it obviously won’t go to all cities every day.

The company is owned entirely by Mogensen, who sold his company, Oz Communications, to Nokia in 2008 for “hundreds of millions” of dollars, he said.

Mogensen, 47, said he went into “semi-retirement” after the sale but “I got bored to death and was looking for another challenge. I thought, Why not an airline. Everyone discouraged me. That made me even more excited.” He launched Wow in 2012.

Mogensen said his ad agency came up with the name Wow, but he liked it immediately, even more so when he learned that people understand and use the term in many languages.

Wow’s goal is to carry 1.5 million passengers this year, up from 740,000 last year.

UPDATE: The original version of this story said 10 percent of seats on each flight would be available at the introductory fares. Mogensen clarified that only 10 percent of capacity on certain dates would be available at $99 to Iceland and $199 to Europe.

When Wow’s inaugural fares from San Francisco International were posted at 6 a.m. Tuesday morning, the only flights from SFO to Iceland available at $99 this year were on June 10, 17, 24, and on Saturdays from Sept. 24 through November 12. Flights on other days were either are $379 or $459. Mogensen said in an email that, “Unfortunately do to caching issues all prices did not appear correctly when we went (live) this morning. That has now been corrected. There should be many options below $300.”

From SFO to Paris with a stop in Iceland, the only flights for $199 were on June 13, 20, 27 and on Mondays from Sept. 26 to Nov. 14.

There were no flights from SFO to Southern European destinations connecting through Iceland. “Regarding the Southern Europe destinations those are our summer only destinations and for the first launch we are focusing on our most common frequent year round destinations, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Dublin. Connections to all destinations will be added in the coming days and weeks,” Mogensen said.