If Everyone Hates Spirit Airlines, How Is It Making So Much Money?

Because people purchasing airfare prioritize price over service.<p>Money quote: “Businesses that look at what people say,” [Ben Baldanza, Spirit CEO] argues, “don’t do as well as businesses that look at what people actually do.”

I love spirit. If I can save $50 on a flight that would normally cost $200, that means I can visit my girlfriend 4 times instead of 3 for the same price. I&#x27;m not particularly tall so there&#x27;s no change in comfort for me. I wish they had more routes though, been handing a good percentage of my annual salary to delta.

Because of low income people who need to get places and are used to being treated poorly. Sometimes you have no choice.

Spirit has been mostly fine but you should price in the cost of eventually getting stranded by them in the flight cost. I&#x27;ve flown them at least a dozen times and been stranded once where the next flight would be 4 days later so I had to suck it up and buy a flight back on Southwest.

Well, here are the key bits:<p>&gt; Branding experts are forever telling us that this scenario simply isn’t possible; eventually a negative popular image will crush your business. If that’s the case, how do we explain Spirit?<p>&gt; Sure, there were lots of complaints, but Spirit consistently delivered on its low-cost promise, and that’s why customers kept coming. “Businesses that look at what people say,” he argues, “don’t do as well as businesses that look at what people actually do.”<p>As for why Spirit is an easy punch-line, I think a lot of it is the name. There’s not much to go on with American Airlines, Delta, Southwest, United, etc., but <i>Spirit</i> sets up such a contrast between the name (noble, eternal, incorporeal!) and the experience (no-frills, optimized for cost, and extremely corporeal!). It’s nice irony.

What a senseless question. You could ask the same thing about Walmart or dollar stores, or why most people watch YouTube with ads. Just because I feel it&#x27;s the best move to save money by using your services doesn&#x27;t mean I don&#x27;t also feel your service sucks.

People HATE that they have to pay for every additional service, but LOVE the original low (and overall lower) price.<p>When they travel only nickel-and-diming is visible.<p>But then, when they plan a new trip, they remember that overall it was not so bad and apparently decide it was worth it.

My most recent Spirit flight was $200 cheaper than any other airline. I have a bag that&#x27;s the exact personal item dimensions, and generally pack very light as it is, so the restrictions don&#x27;t affect me at all. And honestly, I think largely because no one can recline, the seats are not that uncomfortable. I&#x27;ve been on more uncomfortable British Airways flights (they still fly some extremely old 747s on their North American routes).<p>So I save $200 to be slightly more uncomfortable for 2 hours, on a piece of my journey that simply has to happen. No one flies just for fun, people have somewhere they&#x27;re trying to be.

A key thing to keep in mind with air travel customers is that it&#x27;s nigh-impossible to effectively search and filter on anything past price and <i>maybe</i> number of free bags. Thus, you get people buying seats with no leg room... because travel search sites lump everything together, and without researching every single flight in the list, there&#x27;s no way to actually see how much leg room there is in advance.

Because noone wants to pay. We are still flying the same speed as we did fifty years ago. Imagine for a second that you could fly from London to Sydney in ten hours (that&#x27;s the Concorde speed on a route over Panama City so that almost all of the flight is over a sea to avoid any problems with sonic booms) but a ticket would be 15 000 dollars. Noone developed that plane.

Its not like a lot of airlines have good reputations flying out of the same places as Spirit. For a certain type of travel (one carryon, not super long flight), its actually ok. They suck but the lower price compensates for the difference in suck between them and some of the others.<p>They&#x27;re the burner phone of airlines.

I&#x27;d take spirit on a short trip where I need only a small carry on. I just don&#x27;t generally need flights that fit that scenario, especially on the east coast where I prefer the comfort and ease of Amtrak. I hate airports.<p>I wish this country had high speed rail.

Because <i>&quot;Everyone hates Spirit Airlines&quot;</i> obviously isn&#x27;t true, despite the impression the author may have gotten from mass media and social media, neither of which are representative of the full population.<p>If you have a gut feeling (<i>&#x27;everybody hates Spirit&#x27;</i>) and hard facts (<i>&#x27;Spirit is profitable and has loads of customers&#x27;</i>) that seem to contradict each other, maybe <i>just maybe</i> you should consider the possibility that your gut feeling is just flat wrong.