Play Airlines launched where WOW Air died — and ended the same way, six years later

Play was Iceland's second attempt at the same idea: a low-cost carrier connecting Europe and North America through Reykjavik's Keflavik airport, launched in 2021 as the successor to WOW Air, which had collapsed in 2019. The premise was that WOW's failure had been about management, not geography — that the hub between the continents still worked if run carefully.

It did not work carefully enough. Play struggled to reach sustained profitability against rising competition and high operating costs; in autumn 2024 it abandoned the transatlantic model altogether, retreating to European and Canary Islands routes with a rump US network of three cities. The board later said the new strategy should have been implemented earlier. Ticket sales in the final weeks were poor, and staff morale broke over the strategy changes.

On 29 September 2025 the board pulled the plug with immediate effect: all flights cancelled, thousands of passengers stranded mid-itinerary, about 400 employees out of work. The statement said every option had been exhausted and apologised 'to everyone negatively affected'. The case is the route map itself: a thin-capitalised carrier betting on a hub model that had already killed its predecessor, then discovering — one strategy reversal too late — that the smaller network could not carry the cost base the bigger one had built.