The Ups and Downs of Airlines and Air Travel

[mike carey]

[56harrisond]

Why Spirit Airlines Failed

 

[+ Vegas_Millennial]

17 hours ago, 56harrisond said:

Why Spirit Airlines Failed

When I was young and inexperienced, I once had a connecting flight on Frontier. NEVER AGAIN! Based on my brief experience with Frontier, wouldn't even think of booking a low-cost airline like Spirit, Frontier, or Allegiant. 

[mike carey]

8 hours ago, Vegas_Millennial said:

When I was young and inexperienced, I once had a connecting flight on Frontier. NEVER AGAIN! Based on my brief experience with Frontier, wouldn't even think of booking a low-cost airline like Spirit, Frontier, or Allegiant. 

I generally choose not to book with LCCs. I choose not to deal with the likely limited leg room and nickel and diming for things that are suddenly (but always predictably, or even notified as) not included in the fare. I know enough to expect these things, and in another life (or stage of life) I might choose to accept them as factors in my decision to book a fare. But here and now, not happening.

LCCs spend as much as they need to protect their reputations. Just happens that that's not very much at all.

[+ PhileasFogg]

On 6/16/2026 at 6:22 PM, 56harrisond said:

Why Spirit Airlines Failed

 

Aftermath observation. A neighbor said he drove up to NOLA rather than fly.  He couldn’t justify paying $600 for a ticket that was previously $50 on Spirit

😳1,800 mile round trip…30 hrs of windshield time (he’s self employed in a professional hourly billing profession), and about >70 gallons of gas to not spend $600 on a ticket.  But it also makes me question how/why Spirit didn’t push the value proposition more to higher base fares - but then, I never flew Spirit 

[mike carey]

5 minutes ago, PhileasFogg said:

Aftermath observation. A neighbor said he drove up to NOLA rather than fly.  He couldn’t justify paying $600 for a ticket that was previously $50 on Spirit

😳1,800 mile round trip…30 hrs of windshield time (he’s self employed in a professional hourly billing profession), and about >70 gallons of gas to not spend $600 on a ticket.  But it also makes me question how/why Spirit didn’t push the value proposition more to higher base fares - but then, I never flew Spirit 

That's not unusual, people often don't pause to understand the actual costs of what they are doing, they focus on a headline number and decide that it is 'unreasonable'. Sometimes you need to take a step back, or several, and look dispassionately at what's in front of you.

In April, I booked a flight from NYC to Boston (train fares were not cheap) and only then checked, and could have booked an award seat on the same flight for a number of miles I could have bought the same day for less (and which I had in my account anyway and had acquired for even less). In November I got it right, a flight from PHX to LAX would have cost me over $AU500 (AA prices my fares in AUD because I use an AU credit card), but were available for 9k Qantas miles, which was at most $AU180 to me.

I wouldn't dream of suggesting that 30 hours behind the wheel might be more pleasant than a Spirit flight, and nor could I guarantee that airline miles might be a solution. Sometimes paying the 'unreasonable' fare might be the most sensible thing to do, and the one that is actually the most cost effective.

[+ PhileasFogg]

47 minutes ago, mike carey said:

flight from NYC to Boston

 

47 minutes ago, mike carey said:

flight from PHX to LAX

Hopefully the next trip will include “to MSY” in the itinerary 😉
 

…just not in the summertime 🥵🔥
 

 

 

Edited June 25 by PhileasFogg

[mike carey]

1 minute ago, PhileasFogg said:

Hopefully the next trip will include “to MSY” in the itinerary 😉

That thought had crossed my mind when I read your earlier post. And I won't need to risk Spirit.

[nomad]

Was pleasantly surprised at how good a Frontier flight was.  Plane was a newer model and comfortable.  Flight left on time, landed early.  No frills, but I wasn't expecting any. 

[mike carey]

This is two separate stories in the same video. One is of something that is either one of the most significant recent events in civil aviation or the last defiant gasp in a changing world where long distance aviation will no longer survive.

The other is one of perhaps overweening corporate ambition without the technical or business vision or capacity to reach its targets. A tale of how far hubris can lead the mighty to fall. There is a long-standing thread elsewhere in these forums asking, 'Will it Ever Fly' into which this post could go, but that would be to elevate the shortfalls over the achievement delivered. 

Perhaps I'm overdramatising the whole thing. 

Although it's about the story of this past week, this video has interesting analysis of the development paths of long haul civil aviation over the past two decades and the limits that physics and finance impose on how far further it can go.