Wizz Air passengers face £55 fines for carrying common flight essential

If you love catching up on your sleep during flights, you might want to keep reading (Picture: Getty Images)

When it comes to hand luggage, Wizz Air has a reputation for less than generous allowances and ‘strict’ enforcement.

The airline also imposes a particularly controversial rule that could catch out even the most experienced traveller.

On its website, the carrier lists a number of possessions customers are allowed to take on board ‘at no extra cost’, including a coat or blanket, phone, books, or purchases from Duty Free.

But eagle-eyed passengers may spot that one important item is missing.

As far as Wizz Air is concerned, neck pillows are ‘not considered a separate free item’ — meaning they’re required to fit in your cabin bag.

And if yours doesn’t, you might be slapped with a £55 fine.

This innocent flight essential could leave holiday-goers with a rather hefty fee (Picture: Getty Images)

For some people — especially those travelling in budget seats, which aren’t exactly known for comfort — neck pillows are an in-flight essential.

However, packing one for a Wizz Air flight could require some serious suitcase Tetris (and likely leaving that third pair of shoes at home) to avoid falling foul of the policy.

While most airlines allow you to wear them through the gate, this isn’t the case here.

In fact, the moment that pillow leaves your bag, it can ‘be treated as an additional item and be subject to the applicable oversized or excess baggage charges’.

While Wizz Air may be in the spotlight right now, Ryanair has historically been considered the strictest airline when it comes to baggage allowance (Picture: Getty Images)

According to Reddit users, the likelihood of being fined often comes down to the member of staff you’re faced with that day — with a number of people noting they’ve ‘never had any problems.’

‘It depends how lucky you are and what instruction received the crew at the gate,’ writes @NijeMojNalog.

‘For example, most of the time they just leave you holding the pillow outside of the backpack, but last time my girlfriend has been asked to put her pillow back inside and measure the backpack. Because there was no space for it, they charged €50 just for the pillow’.

Another commenter, @Neroli98, claims to have taken ‘over 50 WizzAir flights’ without paying for the privilege of hanging a neck pillow from their backpack, but @bhomburg says they recently watched a whole group of passengers get penalised for doing the same.

Stuffing clothes into hollow neck pillows or small cushions is a common hack nowadays, and creators on social media even claim that the best way to maximise your allowance is by rolling up garments into a sausage shape and tying it round your neck.

Yet although these tricks sometimes pay off, other times not so much, with writer Matthew Klint warning people: ‘Be prepared to pay up if you get “caught” with the extra item.’

Otherwise, your safest bet to avoid an awkward run-in may be an inflatable neck pillow, which you can then blow up once you’re on board.

Either way, you’ll have less to carry around with you. But if you’re flying with Wizz Air, it saves you the hassle of trying to fit a bulky memory foam horseshoe into a small underseat backpack that measures just 40×30×20 cm.

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