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WOW Airlines has announced new service from Chicago, and to kick off the new route they have one-way flights to Reykjavik, Iceland from $99.99 and round trip flights starting at $249.99:
Availability is also shown on Google Flights, but pricing was higher ($269 for the same flights above)
As a budget carrier, remember that WOW Air will charge additional fees for everything from checked bags to selecting your seat. They even charge for a carry-on bag, and it isn’t cheap:
Those prices are each way — so just a standard carry-on bag adds $100 to a round trip ticket.
However, these fees can be a great use of the travel credits on cards like the Chase Ritz-Carlton, the Citi Prestige, or the Chase Sapphire Reserve (but not the CNB Crystal Visa Infinite, which limits the annual travel credit to domestic carriers). Of course, the travel credit from the Sapphire Reserve or Prestige could be used towards airfare and cover the cost of the ticket entirely. The Chase Ritz-Calrton credit must be used on incidental fees — but fees like checked bags and seat selection fit that criteria easily. Information on all of these cards can be found on our Best Offers page.
Seat selection fees vary based on the type you’d like:
In 2015, I flew WOW and used travel credit from my Ritz-Calrton Visa card to cover seat selection and checked baggage fees. I chose XXL seating on a flight from Boston to London and found it to be more spacious than the average domestic first class seat in the US. A One Mile at a Time reader did a trip report in 2015 that has some pictures of the space you can expect with XXL seating. He’s also got a good tip about which seat to select, which made our flight more comfortable. I had trouble changing my seat selection online (I had selected a different XXL seat before reading his review), but the Twitter team was very responsive and able to help me with it.
WOW Air’s website has a flexible dates search feature so you can look for availability a week at a time. Dates at $99/$149 are limited, but at the time of writing I found $99 dates in September and October. At the moment, it looks like flights are only bookable from July to October. If you’re based in Chicago, it would be worth signing up for their email list for future promotions. There is a link on their home page, where you can also search for the fares above.
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