I could fly from the middle of the USA to Orlando round trip for $90 if I just packed a backpack. Unbeatable value, that’s cheap enough for a spur of the moment weekend trip for the whole family.

Only on a nonstop. Spirit dumps passengers all the time on vonnections.

Not a fan of spirit. I used to kind of like Frontier, but they ended that.

I was doing a two hour flight monthly for business, 2 hours each way. Frontier was about half the cost of more premium airlines. The times were good and predictable. I never checked anything and maybe rarely I’d buy a snack. Now I won’t claim that it was “comfortable” but it was predictable, inexpensive and kind of efficient all of which sort of creates a ‘comfort.’ It was a flying bus and it was ok at that.

Somewhere, I think when there became competition for the ultra discount airlines, the staff culture changed and it seemed not uncommon to encounter an employee that resented the customers. Spirit had multiple reported incidents of crew filming customers and just being generally antagonistic. Basically they hire service people that generally don’t have to provide much service and it becomes ”extra work” when they do;worse they often see a price tag associated with the “extra work” and it’s not reflected in their compensation

I am American and it baffles me as well. Spirit was one of the worst possible choices for flying, where every little thing was an upcharge. Why people willingly submitted to that insanity I will never understand.

They often had the cheapest fares. That's basically the reason for all the shitty upcharges in the airline industry. Many folks don't care enough about that kind of thing to pay more for a flight on a different airline.

They had affordable flights between places like LA and Vegas / Florida and Cancún so it became almost like a bus route for some people.

It had good departure times both mornings and evenings.

And it was cheap, so you could book a next day flight without paying multiples in premium.

It was fun and affordable to fly out of state in the morning, spend a day exploring another place and get back at night.

For clarity, absolutely nobody did or does this. Spirit is bottom of the barrel cheap - it made flying accessible for many people, who otherwise would not fly (think Ryan air). Absolutely nobody was interstate day tripping, especially on spirt, besides this poster.

I'm not sure why you're downvoted. You're definitely right that it's extremely rare behavior.

This is based on access to their passenger records and having done data science analysis on it, or just vibes?

Not sure, maybe people like the underdog or just like the business model, you pay for what you get. I flew them a couple times and it wasn't great.

It and Frontier were the only affordable airlines.

No, it’s a small corp biting the dust.