These are the airlines that still offer an unlimited ‘All You Can Fly’ pass

Only two mainstream airlines, WizzAir and Frontier, are still offering All You Can Fly passes.

In both cases, the cost of the pass is quite reasonable and the clauses relatively straightforward.

However, both with Frontier and WizzAir, the pass is clearly favoring the airline a lot more than it is helping travelers.

And there’s a very logical reason for that.

How these All You Can Fly passes work

Confession: the author of this article has had the brilliant/unfortunate (the jury is still out) idea of purchasing WizzAir’s All You Can Fly pass, so the experience here is first-hand.

WizzAir’s 12-month pass costs the equivalent of $620 – it used to be $520 – and it includes one free flight, and every flight thereafter will cost you €9,99 – so basically $10.

You can fly from anywhere to anywhere in the WizzAir network, including for example the Maldives or Abu Dhabi, but there are a few things to bear in mind.

The first and biggest catch is that you can’t plan ahead, because you can only book flights within 3 calendar days before departure, which means it is impossible to plan any trip that’s not a spur-of-the-moment thing.

In addition to that, seats are always subject to availability, which means most flights are often booked out, and of course luggage or any other extra is never included.

Also, two no-shows are enough to have your pass revoked.

The pass available with Frontier is very similar – it costs $599 for a year or $149 per month – but there are four major differences.

There’s a flat fee of $0.01 but taxes are never included, there are blackout periods, you can book within one (domestic) or 10 (international) calendar days, and you must be a U.S. resident to buy it.

The reason why the clauses are so stringent

This is going to sound so obvious it’s almost silly but it’s worth reminding that airlines want to make sure they’re not going to lose money on these ‘deals’.

It sounds like a ‘duh’ moment today, but it wasn’t always thus.

In the past, some airlines bled money because of these lifetime passes.

There’s the famous case of Tom Stuker.

This guy bought a lifetime pass for $190,000 and that saved him about $2.44 million in fares.

And this was just a famous case, so just imagine how many other people bought a lifetime pass for $190,000 and then cost the airline way more than $190,000.

Then there’s the equally (in)famous case of Steven Rothstein, who bought a a lifetime first-class ticket in the 1980s, racked up 30 million miles with his AAirPass tickets and then got in trouble for it.

Not only did the airline cancel his pass, they even ended up suing him.

Airlines clearly don’t want a repeat of this.