He’s the Richard Branson of Iceland. He owns his own airline and now he’s taking on the big boys. This week on Leaders of Travel I meet Skúli Mogensen – founder of WOW air.
Hello and welcome to the second episode of Leaders of Travel.
Today, I’ve got a confession to make. I’m a bit of an airline geek so I always love to hear about how things work behind the scenes. That’s why I’m pretty excited to speak to Skúli Mogensen today.
He’s from Iceland and made his fortune in the tech, media and telecommunications industry.
In 2011 Skuli started a new airline called WOW air and he is the founder, CEO and sole owner. Pretty cool.
If I owned an airline I would just fly around the world in first class the whole time. But Skúli can’t do that because WOW air is a budget airline. It uses Reykjavik in Iceland as its base and mainly does flights around Europe, taking people to Iceland for holidays.
But it’s actually getting well known now for flights between Europe and North America that you can get for as low as 99 US dollars one way sometimes. The catch is that it’s a budget airline so you can’t expect wine the whole way. You also have to do a plane change in Reykjavik.
Still, it’s really popular and WOW Air has just announced new flights between the west coast of the US and Europe as well.
Along with all of that – Skuli is an extreme skiing and adrenaline junkie and cares about the environment. Urgh… could one person get any more cool?
So, there we go, a cheap way to cross the Atlantic, if you’re looking for something like that. Just make sure you take a good book with you.
Make sure you tune in again next week when I’ll have another great interview. I’ll be speaking with the woman in charge of tourism for the Kenyan Government. Phyllis Kandie has a beautiful country to promote but it’s had a rough time of late – with terrorism attacks and some other problems. I’ll be finding out what the situation is like at the moment and whether you should be going yourself.
