Time to End the Spirit Airlines Experiment?
Spirit Airlines began as a small charter airline company out of East Detroit, Michigan. Later, it got too big for its britches, moved to Fort Lauderdale and adopted a lowest-common-denominator business model in which passengers sacrificed dignity and reliability in exchange for cheapskate prices.
The model worked fine, except when it didn’t. Then, regularly over the years, we would see sad passengers left in the lurch, complaining about Spirit’s terrible customer service. And Spirit would say, hey, remember? You wanted a flight for $89 and this is what you get.
Spirit is on the verge of selling itself to Frontier Airlines now, another airline that is less sketchy but of the same mindset — ala carte everything. The problem now is that due to labor shortages, the ravages of the pandemic and high fuel prices, two things are happening, neither good.
First of all, other airlines aren’t doing so hot with reliability anymore. Delta, Southwest, American and United all have experienced staff shortages, planes out of position, hours-long delays and worst of all, over-promising and under-delivering. Greedy for profitability again — and who can blame them? — airlines are taking any and all reservations, even if they don’t have the staff and equipment to provide the service. It’s like taking 100 dinner reservations at your restaurant when you only have 80 tables. It’s not gonna turn out well.
The second trend is the effect of high fuel prices at a time of high travel demand. These factors are so high that even cheapo airlines Spirit and Frontier have had to raise fares, so by the time you pay for a bag and a seat, their heavily advertised “cheap” fares are not. So now you have the situation where people are paying an arm and a leg for a ticket but still getting bare-bones service.
A lot of people over the years have asked me if they should fly Spirit. My answers have been basically no, no and no. However, today the reliability of the other airlines has declined so much that perhaps, hey, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps this spring, Spirit is no worse than Delta, Soutwest, American or United in reliability and a tiny bit better on price. Want to gamble? Your call. You never know which airline will run smoothly the day you fly.
At any rate, Spirit likely will be swallowed up soon by Frontier, and then, that experiment will end — and a new one will begin.