Calling Spirit Airlines on the Ouija Board
Will customers miss this carrier if it dies?
“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” – Sam Walton
You may soon need a modified Ouija Board to contact Spirit Airlines – one that includes dollar symbols.
At Spirit Airlines, no matter how small your “Spirit-ual” request, the answer is always: $$$.
This is the carrier that helped pioneer the business of luring customers with loss-leader fares and then slamming them with an annoying array of charges.
Someday, it may be nickeled-and-dimed to death by bankruptcy attorneys.
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Cutting its way to your heart
For now, Spirit Airlines is chiseling itself. The Miramar, Fla.-based company said this week it would furlough 260 pilots and defer deliveries on new Airbus jets – moves that will preserve cash, but also curb revenue opportunities. And just in time for the summer travel season.
Despite booming post-pandemic air-travel demand, this airline has lost money for the past six quarters, amounting to annual losses of $447 million in 2023 and $554 million in 2022.
Its stock, which trades under the ticker symbol SAVE, has nosedived more than 72% so far this year.
Some analysts have said Spirit is spiraling toward bankruptcy.
Blame it on issues with Pratt & Whitney engines. Or blame it on the Justice Department, which has scuttled a life-saving merger between Spirit and JetBlue. But does America really need a monopoly in the rude-service, fee-grubbing, passenger-stranding segment of the airline industry?
Spirit and JetBlue rank high among the airlines with the most complaints, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Put them together and they’ll just set new records.
Besides, there’s no shame in bankruptcy. Just ask just almost any other airline because the bankruptcy process has been one of the many ways U.S. commercial aviation has subsidized itself as it competes with deceptively low fares.
Not inexpensive – cheap
When I lived in Miami, I briefly got to know Spirit’s former CEO Ben Baldanza, who served in that role from 2005 to 2016 and led its transformation into the ultra-low-cost carrier that it is today. I liked him personally. He was much nicer than customer service agents I’d heard about. He was also genuine, straight-forward and unashamed of the raunchy advertising Spirit had been running.
Baldanza was not disheartened by negative customer reviews. He was proud of his customer service approach: If you’re going to complain, fly somebody else. If you pay less, expect less.
He had identified a huge class of consumers who cared mostly about the fare and shouldn’t have expected to be treated all that well for the price.
The flaw in this business plan is that Spirit Airlines can easily be replaced by another set of number-crunching executives and investors offer lower fares and even lower corporate pride. There’s no loyalty here: A bankruptcy liquidation, and a few coats of paint, and Spirit Airlines could emerge as someone else’s flying schlock show.
“The people who choose to fly with Spirit … are budget leisure travelers and will move to any airline that charges $10 less,” Reno Bianchi of aviation debt research firm Asterisk Advisors told Bloomberg.
No Spirit in the sky
Spirit Airlines is a forerunner of everything we hate about commercial air travel.
Nobody is going to waste their money on a Ouija Board if Spirit Airlines dies. Customers say they can’t even get it on the phone now.
They fly it because it looks cheap and often come to regret it.
The Internet is flooded with bad customer reviews and horror stories on just about every airline. But here are some recent quips from flyers gathering on a Facebook group called “Spirit Airlines Sucks!”
“Well, it's been a month. My daughter's bags are sitting in the Guatemala airport, airtags say so, and no one answers phones or emails.”
“From the time we walked in from the time we got to the gate, every employee we encountered was rude.”
“Wacked me $79 for bag being 4lbs over. I used two scales at home to verify I was under before I left for the airport.”
“First Time and Last Time with Spirit!!! The Slumlord Of the Sky. I am sick to my soul today!!!!”
“You don’t actually fly Spirit airline you sit in the airport for all night long trying to figure out how you can afford a hotel and rental car since the plane never took off.”
“This is been going on for years, and all of us have warned people, so not sure why you would buy a ticket from them.”
“They ruined a chance to be good, cheap air travel. Robbing people wasn't a very good business model.”
“Ha ha! The Jet Blue merger is canceled! Great news! Hopefully this garbage airline will be bankrupt and out of business soon!”
In fairness, I’ve never flown Spirit Airlines, frightened off by its customer reviews. Have you? Please share your thoughts.
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"Spirit in the Sky"- Norman Greenbaum
Another excellent post! I've never flown Spirit. Though I've flown Indian Airlines, British Overseas Airways Corp ("Better On A Camel"), Pan Am, TWA, American Airlines, Delta ("Gets You There - Almost," slogan around D/FW in the 1980s), Northwest Orient, Lufthansa, KLM, Air France, etc. Since roughly 9/11, for a variety of reasons that turned out to be more excuses, airlines in the US have increasingly charged more for less: less service, less comfort, less consideration, less pleasant adventure. Add to that Boeing ("The Sound of Bolts Flying Off," according to SNL), and even Airbus rush to manufacture, rush to increase profit margin, rush to not increase pay, rush to charge for jet fuel (the CHEAPEST by-product of oil refining after asphalt) even when oil prices are lower, and the experience of 'taking flight' has turned into the equivalent of herding cattle onto trucks to transport them. You're right. Nobody needs a monoply in the rude, cheap, and extra-fee category of 'air travel.' But it sure would be great for a small fly-by-night operation to return to serving 'customers' as CUSTOMERS, as in the people paying (less, maybe) for MORE, rather than less for less.