Skuli loves purple

Skuli Morgensen loves purple.

His airplanes are purple, and his flight attendants wear purple dresses, purple scarves, purple hats.

His cut rate Icelandic airline is called WOW and their endearing and quirky goal is to, well, WOW you.

I unexpectedly needed to get back to Toronto for a meeting so I cobbled together a fast flight from Bristol and the best way was via Iceland, with a stop ever in Reykjavik, aboard one of Skuli’s planes.

I say “Skuli’s” because, having sold his high tech company to NOKIA in 2008, he appears to have set up WOW from scratch in 2011. It’s not a public company, it’s wholly owned by Skuli and a private investment group.

It’s unquestionably a budget airline: no screens, no freebies, NO baggage allowance whatsoever (I had a laptop briefcase: anything bigger would have cost extra), just a small seat in a packed purple plane.

The Icelandic sense of whimsy permeates the business. Skuli’s fleet of 11 planes have individually selected call letters: the flagship is christened TF-WOW, while others carry “family” names: TF-MOM, TF-DAD, TF-LUV, TF-BRO, TF-GAY and so on.

The Inflight magazine carries a half page ad for the Icelandic Penis Museum (slogan: “We love dicks!” Don’t believe me? Go to http://phallus.is/en/) and for Lebowski’s Bar in Reykjavic which is, yes, named after the character in the Coen Brothers movie “The Big Lebowski”. There’s an innocence to this brazen appropriation that is somehow endearing.

And WOW seems to have been instrumental in restoring Iceland’s economy, after the country’s banking disaster in 2008: today, tourism is Iceland’s largest industry. WOW makes it easy for anyone interested in visiting Iceland to see glaciers and hot springs and whales, because every WOW passenger between Europe and North America changes planes in Reykjavik.

Want to fly to London for less than $400 return? Fly through Reykjavik, and stop over in Iceland for free for a few days along the way.

It’s a strategy that’s clearly working and, seeing as Skuli is also active in both the tourism business and Icelandic banking, you get the sense that with every Icelandic Krona spent on this inhospitable island, a little piece falls into Skuli’s pocket. And lots of Krona are being spent, as Iceland in insanely expensive, given the fact that virtually everything has to be brought in from elsewhere.

Before getting on the plane at Reykjavik airport that was taking me to Toronto I bought a tuna sandwich and a small bottle of water: twenty two bucks.

And all around me, in the packed airport, at least a thousand other people were doing likewise.

Those purple planes are pretty practical after all.