Zeitgeist: A Postmortem on Spirit Airlines
- Chad Manley
- May 11
- 23 min read
Updated: May 14
I’ve been wanting to write a couple of pieces on the airline industry for a few months, in particular about how small changes in airline policies have had snowball effects on the flying experience more broadly. With the sudden and shocking announcement of Spirit Airlines exiting the market for good, I decided that many of those piecewise tangents could be combined into a more coherent reflection on the industry. With that said, I believe we are ready for takeoff.
Part I
Spirit Airlines has been in the news every few months for a variety of reasons, usually bad, and they have become the punchline of the airline industry; brawls among their customers (and sometimes their employees as well) breaking out at the ticketing counter, at the gate, and even on the plane; rude, vulgar, and undertrained employees harassing passengers and each other; a blatant disrespect for passengers and their belongings, all wrapped up in a company known best for its planes with a fitting banana yellow paint job, jarring and obnoxious on the runway at any airport next to the dull, white planes of legacy airlines. All these details created a persona for Spirit that was much stronger and more believable than any other company with their laundry lists of HR-generated corporate values. And that persona was a natural outgrowth of their business model: provide air travel at the lowest cost possible.
To Spirit’s credit, they achieved that goal. Shockingly low fares accompanied by shockingly poor customer service. However, at the same time that their annual passenger counts were reaching all-time highs, their debt was also spiraling out of control, and their growing costs threatened their base airfare pricing. Although they added upcharges for everything from carry-on bags to checked bags to printing your boarding pass, it was the costs of owning and operating the planes themselves that got them into the financial trouble in which they found themselves in 2020.
Even by 2019 and earlier, Spirit was facing stiff competition from other, larger airlines. Carriers like United and American (which I’m more familiar with because of where I live) started adding base economy fares with less legroom and without a checked bag. These seats are positioned all the way at the back of the plane right next to the bathrooms, but also far enough behind the engines that I do wonder if hearing protection should be offered. The benefit that United or JetBlue have over Spirit is their larger profit margin. Since Spirit wanted to offer flights for as cheap as possible, it meant that there was very little money left for the company at the end of the day. United can have first class passengers at the front of the plane, premium economy, and standard economy all paying an extra $5 per ticket to offset the differences from the basic economy fares at the back of the plane—loss leaders get customers in the door (or on the plane, as the case may be), but the company always needs other charges or customers to offset those losses. Ideally, basic economy passengers would not always be flying basic economy, and in that way the hierarchy of airplane seating becomes a microcosm for social welfare programs. But I digress.
In December of 2019, Spirit announced that they would be updating their entire fleet with 100 new Airbus aircraft. Surely with their growing customer base, nothing would stop them from selling enough airfare to pay off the massive debts and financial obligations they would incur through such a large fleet upgrade.
Cue COVID-19. We all remember the restrictions on air travel, so I won’t bore you, dear reader, with the trip down memory lane. This was difficult for many airlines, but especially Spirit because of their business model: lowest fares possible. Spirit received some assistance from the federal government for the pandemic downturn in flying, but this began a debt spiral from which Spirit, despite its growing customer base, name recognition, and service territory, would never financially recover.
Again, other airlines were also negatively impacted, but because they had been operating with larger profits (or really any profits) for many years, they could survive the torrential headwinds of the pandemic much better than Spirit could. And if Spirit had delayed its purchase of the Airbus fleet by six months for whatever reason (e.g., securing the finances, decisions to purchase or lease the aircraft, conversations with Airbus about securing the delivery date of the ordered planes), I think they would have survived the ordeal. It wasn’t bad planning as much as it was bad timing, completely beyond the control or predictive powers of the executives at Spirit.
Although ridership rebounded in the long economic recovery that followed the pandemic, the debts that Spirit incurred were still all-too-present, all while inflation drove personnel and maintenance costs higher and higher. Any other company would raise prices, but Spirit knew that its customers chose to fly with them specifically because their low fares made air travel an option. Raising prices too much would exclude the very passengers they sought to bring onboard their planes.
It was in early 2022 that Frontier Airlines announced its plans to acquire Spirit for $2.9 billion. Two months later, JetBlue offered to buy Spirit for $3.6 billion. This acquisition would have made JetBlue the fifth-largest airline in the American market. Then the Department of Justice sued both entities to stop the merger.
The details of this DOJ lawsuit have been brought to light and under intense scrutiny in the last few days, so I will be brief in my summary: DOJ claimed that the merger would make JetBlue too large and monopolistic (although they didn’t have this concern with the four larger airlines in America) and that JetBlue’s plan to increase fares and reduce the number of flights was not to make Spirit’s operations profitable, but rather to price gouge the lower-income Americans who relied on Spirit’s base fares the most (even though low-income Americans don’t have money to gouge, and basic economics tells us that raising fares excludes them from air travel, which would result in less money for the airline, meaning that the budget airline has an incentive to raise prices as little as possible). The federal judge overseeing the case struck down the merger, effectively sentencing Spirit to death all while stating in his decision that he was saving it.
Spirit needed the merger because its financial obligations for airplane maintenance, ownership, and rental had been exceeding their ability to keep fares low. Had it been acquired by another company, the influx of cash would have allowed them to pay their obligations, keep up with maintenance, and cover fluctuating fuel costs and rising payroll expenses all while only marginally increasing their fares. I think Spirit would actually work better as a subsidiary of a legacy airline because (like basic economy on United or American) it would be a loss leader for the larger airline conglomerate—operating at, near, or even below a zero profit, but funded by the larger airline and, in time, bringing the budget customers over to the legacy airline.
The DOJ disagreed, and in believing they were helping Spirit and its customer base, they were locking the budget airline into its years-long tailspin from which it would never recover. In November 2024, just over a year after the federal judge’s decision, Spirit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A few months later, Frontier offered to buy the budget airline again, this time for $2.1 billion, but Spirit rejected the offer because it would require its creditors (who were already not being paid because of the Chapter 11 fiasco) to invest an additional $350 million. Spirit filed for Chapter 11 again in August of 2025 and stated publicly that they were running out of money and had no idea how much longer they could continue operations. The months that followed saw furloughs, layoffs, and a final plea to the federal government for $500 million in bailout money. This request was denied and the final Spirit Airlines flight landed at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport early in the morning of May 2nd, 2026.
Part II
Though Spirit Airlines has left the gate and flown their banana yellow planes off to that great big airport in the sky, it has left behind a great deal of baggage with the airline industry. Their business model of base pricing and surcharges for every little additional service, no matter how small or menial, has, unfortunately, become a more standard practice within American domestic air travel. Pricing mechanisms that worked for Spirit don’t work for any other airline.
For example, the price of an airline ticket used to always include one checked bag. In the mid-2010s, different legacy airlines began charging extra for a bag to go under the plane, usually around $40. Passengers, who, though not flying with a budget carrier, are still very price-conscious, responded to this pricing mechanism the same way that anyone who has taken Econ 101 would predict: passengers stopped checking luggage unless it was absolutely necessary and just started packing everything into carry-on bags. Carry-on bags, as a result, grew larger in size and popularity; almost everyone in an airport terminal has a rollerbag intended for the overhead bin on the plane. There’s just one small problem: the overhead bins were never designed to fit rollerbags for a majority of passengers, so shortly after boarding begins, the gate agent has to announce that they’ve run out of overhead space and need to gate check bags to their final destination. To make matters worse, boarding times have gotten longer and longer mostly as a result of these giant and ubiquitous carry-on bags. In another perverse incentive, gate checking is done free of charge, so a passenger’s incentive is really to take an entire suitcase through airport security and then check it at the gate to save the checked bag fee. Not only did this fee slow down boarding and create more delays, it actually encourages passengers to behave badly to avoid the fee altogether even if it creates an inconvenience for the ground crew and everyone else on the plane.
Spirit’s reasoning behind carry-on fees and checked bag fees was simple: cheapest fares possible. Charge only for the cost to fly a person on their seat, add a surcharge for anything and everything else. Despite bad, unprofessional, and sometimes violent behavior from both the Spirit passengers and staff, their delay times were among the lowest in the industry, because through their pricing mechanisms, they disincentivized any and all bells and whistles of modern flying that often cause delays for legacy carriers.
While airlines like United and American introduced surcharges for additional services that used to be included, they only needed to do so for the base economy class of airfare—these were the customers they were trying to win over from Spirit and other budget carriers, so it would make sense to copy those pricing strategies for just those passengers. Instead, they have made the experience of flying entirely à la carte. I hate this. Everyone hates this. It makes flying miserable.
My research in graduate school was in the fields of labor and experimental economics. I do know what I am talking about when it comes to consumer preferences during what we might call economic activity (i.e., buying stuff). People hate, absolutely despise, being nickeled and dimed; being stopped at every available moment to be asked if they want to pay extra for a feature during a service experience, especially when they are shown the sticker price at the time of the offer. It feels like the company views the customer as little more than a cow, just a piece of livestock to be milked for as much money as possible. This is why the last 15 years have shown us enormous growth in industries that can offer products or services for a single payment. In particular, streaming and subscription services come to mind. One might pay $20 per month to stream movies on Netflix or Amazon Prime, but how many people watch enough content in a month to pay for the subscription fee? The problem becomes worse when multiple streaming subscriptions are bundled, in part because we’ve come full circle back to cable television, but also because the cumulative cost of several streaming platform subscriptions makes it very unlikely that the customer is saving money compared to the alternative of renting each movie and TV show independently. And if one watches the same two or three shows on repeat, certainly purchasing the digital licenses will be less expensive in the long run than a never-ending monthly fee. Yet the streaming platforms offer simplicity and convenience. It’s not as difficult to decide to watch a movie because you can just stop watching if you don’t like it. You don’t have to click an extra button to confirm a credit card charge and seriously consider if you want to make the purchase. It’s already included in the price of your monthly subscription.
It’s ironic that at the same time these streaming, lump-sum business models were taking over the world of entertainment, the exact opposite pricing structures were replacing similar all-inclusive prices for airline tickets. A plane ticket used to include a checked bag, a drink, and a snack. Now airlines charge for anything that goes under the plane, they upcharge to sit in certain areas of the plane because the drink service only goes back so far, and the snacks are even more restrictive. If you’re sitting in the last row of the plane, you should consider yourself lucky if they don’t charge you extra to go to the bathroom.
All of this has made flying a miserable experience. Not only do legacy airlines now treat all customers like cash cows, but it’s an unavoidable part of flying. There’s no class of travel or company you can fly with where there will be a single sticker price for the airfare and all of the bells and whistles will be included. This is especially baffling to me because air travel is somewhat unique for its enormous fixed costs that need to be covered before the plane can leave the ground. Would it not behoove the airline to offer a higher ticket price, include in that price all of the services that were once standard (bags, drinks, snacks) and then enjoy the extra revenue from passengers who don’t need to use all of those services? There can still be pricing variation based on how far back on the plane the seat is, how much legroom the seat has, or in an area where the drink service includes alcohol, but the full à la carte flying experience is a direct result of Spirit’s operation in the industry, and I pray that it will one day come to an end.
As a test, I just searched for a flight from Omaha to Salt Lake City for about six weeks from now. After choosing the flight I’d like to take, I’m asked to choose between Main Cabin, Main Cabin Plus, Main Cabin Select, or First Class.
Main Cabin ($717) gets me on the plane and that’s it. There is an upcharge to check a bag, choose a seat with more legroom, and although it says that I’m allowed to make changes, it also lists a surcharge to choose a different same-day flight, so I really have no idea what changes I’m allowed to make for free. I board in group 6, the last one, and if I cancel, I do not get a refund. I get a travel credit. I can choose the option of a proper refund to my credit card for $100 extra.
Main Cabin Plus ($845) includes one checked bag and I can choose an extra legroom seat if I wish, although there’s some fine print that I might have to still pay more for an extra legroom seat if the flight is operated by a partner airline. I board in group 5, and if I cancel, not only do I not get a refund, I don’t even have the upcharge option like I did for Main Cabin. I have to settle for the travel credit.
Main Cabin Select ($863) allows me to choose another same-day flight at no extra charge, but it doesn’t include the checked bag like the cheaper Plus option. I board in group 4, and if I cancel, I get a refund to my original form of payment.
First Class ($1,067) includes two checked bags, the largest seats on the plane, and priority boarding, as well as the ability to choose another same-day flight.
This insane hodgepodge of features and services makes the purchase decision so confusing and stressful for the customer. I have to consider if I value an included checked bag over a proper refund, and if I value it at the extra $18 that I would pay. I also have to wonder if my interpretation of a listed feature is correct. What does it mean that I can make changes for free, but have to pay extra for any change regarding a different same-day flight? It would be a better shopping experience if there was a clear escalation of features and services included in each class of airfare, or better yet, if all of the features were included for all classes (except perhaps the checked bag for the basic economy passengers), and the only variation was legroom or boarding priority.
The fact that Spirit was using these à la carte pricing structures to offer base airfare for passengers who otherwise could not afford to fly is not surprising. What’s odd is that legacy airlines copied those structures and applied them to passengers and classes of airfare that not only did not need them, but did not request them in the first place. As a result, in an attempt to steal ridership from an airline that caters to those who can barely afford to fly, they have cheapened the entire flying experience for everyone on the plane. No one asked for this, and broader economic trends in other industries signaled that customers hated it, but the airlines did it anyway, and because passengers have very few options when it comes to flying, they had no way of telling the airline to stop.
This, unfortunately, is the real legacy of Spirit Airlines. Coupled with the often out-of-control behavior of its passengers and staff, the à la carte pricing structure that caters to only one type of passenger has been imposed on the entire airline industry, much to the chagrin of the 96% of passengers who did not fly with Spirit (Spirit controlled roughly 4% of the market at its peak). The experience for all greatly diminished to accommodate the needs of a few who need only be accommodated individually, if at all. Is this not another symbol of so much of our society? Just today, McDonald’s announced that it would no longer be allowing customers to fill their own drinks at self-service soda fountains, citing “changing customer habits.” We all know what that means. Unlike stealing soda from a fast food restaurant, there’s nothing inherently wrong with base fare pricing models with myriad surcharges, but it’s a pricing structure that is only appreciated by the people who need it most. To everyone else, it’s a nuisance and a source of irritation, confusion, and stress. But thanks to Spirit Airlines, it’s here to stay. That’s what Spirit Airlines really was—the ethos of the time, the zeitgeist. Introduce mediocrity and encourage others to adopt it until the standard features of the past now seem like impossible luxuries.
Part III
Given Spirit’s departure from the airline industry, can we have some sense of security about the future of flying? Will we go back to the days of our forefathers where flying was treated as an experience and airports were more than just bus stops? Where you could carry a martini on the plane and rip a cig in the back? No. Those days are long gone and what Spirit did was let the genie out of the bottle. Their changes to the industry, I believe, are more or less permanent for one simple economic reason: game theory. If airlines go back to the traditional, inclusive pricing structure, it will create a gap in the market for a now large budget airline to enter. I promise you that right now, people at United and Southwest, JetBlue and American are discussing how they can buy out the scrapyard of Spirit Airlines and introduce their own subsidiary budget airline. This is the long way around an acquisition, by the way—wait until the company you want to purchase goes belly-up, then buy up the remains for pennies on the dollar. Plus, you’ll only have to purchase the pieces of equipment that you want, not all the nasty baggage that companies seeking acquisition bring to the gate. Ironically, the DOJ decision to block the JetBlue-Spirit merger may have just allowed JetBlue to purchase the spirit of the budget airline without any of the substance. JetBlue may very well end up operating the remains of Spirit by simply buying their assets and restoring their routes, all without being subject to the DOJ’s antitrust laws and for a fraction of the cost of the original $3.6 billion deal. All it will cost is a year and a half of waiting for market gaps to be filled, the destruction of a budget airline, and 17,000 jobs. Government intervention for the win.
But just as Spirit’s key characteristics were outgrowths of the zeitgeist that it helped to create, we must ask ourselves when the zeitgeist will change again. Unfortunately, I think we will have a very long time to wait, mostly because Spirit did not go out of business due to poor ridership. Airline passengers did not forego cheap fares because they had higher standards for themselves that they thought Spirit was not meeting with their service. Spirit went out of business (I believe) all because of a large purchase decision made just a few months before the largest market crash that the airline industry has ever seen. I am reminded of the poison called The Long Farewell from the television series Game of Thrones (it does not appear in the books). It is typically administered to the target through a kiss. After the assassin kisses their target, the victim will live for days, weeks, maybe even months, but will eventually, and suddenly, drop dead. COVID was the Long Farewell for a number of business models that were only sustainable as long as there was never a need to have large reserves of cash. Academia is another of these industries, especially state schools that always relied on millions of dollars of taxpayer funding to operate every year.
Budget airlines are another example. Airlines in general are unique for their enormous fixed start-up costs, and budget options for flying can and do exist, but they are almost always without cash on hand when the situation calls for emergency funds. The largest anomalous cost factor for any airline, budget or legacy, is not fuel costs—it’s time. Delays and scheduling issues have become more and more common in the airline industry, and the costs of those delays add up very quickly; trained personnel are expensive, and even an hour of their time can cost the entire slim profit margin of a fully packed budget airline flight.
This is why Spirit focused so much on getting planes loaded and boarded in as little time as possible; those bag fees that disincentivized any and all luggage saved the carrier millions in expenses caused by delays. A perfect storm of environmental, economic, and mechanical factors all caused Spirit to cancel more flights and do more frequent maintenance on their aircraft, which quickly ate through whatever cash reserves they had until they finally had to stop service.
All this is to say that a strange combination of factors beyond the control of Spirit’s leadership led to their shutdown and exit from the market, not changing passenger sentiment or preferences. Now, just as Spirit created the zeitgeist of airline travel that currently embodies our airports, perhaps its absence will bring about a new one. I don’t like to simply complain about problems, and I know people don’t like reading complaints, so what solutions might the airline industry think of to usher in a better, more relaxing and respectful flying experience?
Here I introduce the idea of the membership airline.
People love companies where a membership is required to shop: Costco, Sam’s Club, REI, to name a few. What if the same business model were brought to the airline industry. Here’s how it would work:
The passenger must purchase a membership for $500 per year in order to fly. Once the passenger is a member of the airline, they can purchase airfare on routes that will have all of the usual services included—a checked bag, snacks, drinks, polite and respectful gate agents.
The fare for each route is calculated by taking the annual average for the same route offered by legacy airlines and adding 30%.
Members earn points based on how much they spend with the airline, say 2% of the ticket price. At the end of the year, the member receives a voucher based on the earned rewards that they can then apply to future flights.
I’m making up these numbers as I go (30% markup, 2% reward, $500 annual membership fee), but this pricing structure would give an airline early access to liquid cash before a service is expected to be provided, which they can invest in any number of ways, grow the value of the cumulative membership fees, and then increase their profit margin while still earning enough to provide a quality service to its customers. I’m not holding my breath, though. I’m guessing it will be a very long time before any of us are flying with Costco Air, Sam’s Jet, or aiREI.
I know many people simply want an enforced standard of decorum when they fly—appropriately dressed passengers who are courteous to their fellow passengers and airline/airport staff. I want this too, and I know that we could have this tomorrow if airlines and airports simply started requiring it and enforcing it by refusing to allow violators to board their flights. However, the changes in airport etiquette occurred not because of Spirit Airlines but because of the passengers Spirit brought to airports through their base fare pricing structures. Pricing mechanisms can change incentives, behavior, and the culture of an area (like an airport), just as much as enforced rules regarding decorum. I think the way back to the flying experiences of the past is not through rules posted in airport terminals as if we are all first graders who need to be reminded of how to behave, but by simply removing from the premises those who refuse to act appropriately. If we start treating flying like a privilege again, an incredible luxury and an unbelievable product of engineering, then maybe we can bring back the pleasant experiences of the past without a price point to match.
Part IV
As verbose as I was in my explanation of Spirit Airlines’ pricing mechanisms, it occurred to me that perhaps more information was needed regarding consumer experiences and how they’re affected by pricing structures. Spirit’s à la carte pricing model featured a base fare and a surcharge for everything else. While this may be appropriate for certain markets and scenarios, such as getting people in the air for as little money as possible, this type of practice is typically very detrimental to the consumer’s shopping experience. I already described the example of streaming platforms, where few subscribers save money on the monthly fee over the alternative of individually renting everything they watch, but they pay a premium for the convenience—by the way, if this business model didn't work, movie theaters wouldn’t be going out of business—but let’s conduct a thought experiment.
We are all familiar with the experience of grocery shopping: we take a shopping cart, walk down the aisles, put the item we wish to purchase in the cart, then take the cart to the cash register where every item is scanned and we pay the final total. Imagine instead if the entire store was just rows and rows of vending machines. Everything is locked up, and you don’t get to have it until you scan your card or enter the paper bills into the machine. Your final bill would be the same, by the associative property, but doesn’t this sound like a much worse shopping experience?
I can’t go on without mentioning that many grocery stores are halfway to this nightmare, locking up every single piece of merchandise and only opening the case when the customer asks an employee to do so. The reasoning behind this change was, similar to McDonald’s abandonment of self-serve soda fountains, changing consumer habits. People hate grocery stores like this, with all of their products held under lock and key, literally, and requiring the customer to request assistance from an employee several times during a single visit. Most stores that have adopted these high-security layouts are located in high-crime areas where petty crimes, such as shoplifting, often go unpunished. Stores had to take matters into their own hands and lock up all of their merchandise to prevent it from being stolen from a few bad actors in the neighborhood. But the redesigns send a clear message to all of their customers: We don’t trust you.
Back to flying. What message does Spirit send to its customers through its numerous surcharges? I am reminded of a video from a YouTube channel called SubwayTakes in which people debate topics on the New York subway. In one of their most famous videos, a woman argues that Spirit Airlines didn’t deserve the hate they received from the public more generally. She defended their pricing model so well that I doubt Spirit’s attorneys could have done a better job. “Spirit Airlines is the only airline that is actually honest about the service they provide…You don’t pay for customer service. You pay to be shot through the air at roughly an appointed time from an appointed location, and they drop you off.”
The motto of Spirit might as well have been “You didn’t pay for that,” because that was their reasoning behind the absence of every feature that the legacy airlines offered. Their message to the customer was clear: We don’t respect you. You pay for the base fare, and that fare does not include any other feature that is standard for other airlines because we don’t respect you enough to provide it. The behavior of some of their customer-facing employees also sent this message, but it was always underscored by the pricing structure that the company used to deal directly with the customers. The problem is that when interacting with a company that makes it clear it does not respect their customers, the customers are likely to find themselves easily irritable and in an unpleasant mood, which can exacerbate the disrespect from the employees, which can exacerbate the irritability of the customers; an awful feedback loop that makes everything and everyone more miserable.
The legacy airlines then, in an attempt to compete with Spirit for customers who could barely afford to fly, introduced this à la carte pricing model to all classes of their service. But even when it’s used at a different company, that model sends the same message: We don’t respect you. And so customers who used to pay a premium for the inclusion of several features and conveniences were now being asked to pay extra for those abilities specifically (like a $100 fee to get a proper refund), or being asked to upgrade to a higher service class to be treated with the same courtesy that they had grown used to, if at a slightly higher price than what they were currently paying.
Part V
Can this be fixed? I once again must be pessimistic and say no, at least not by the same companies that adopted these pricing structures. I am reminded of the story of the Israeli daycare from Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book Freakonomics. In short, daycare teachers imposed a small fee for late pickup at the end of the day, and the number of parents who picked their kids up late skyrocketed. Parents who were concerned that they were imposing on the teachers and failing as mothers and fathers were shown, through the small fee, that all that anxiety and hand-wringing was only worth $3. Realizing the failure of the incentive, the daycare stopped changing the late pickup fee, but they could never bring back those feelings of responsibility to the teachers and children that had once prompted so many on-time pickups.
The problem with the à la carte pricing model in airlines (or any industry, for that matter) is that the message it sends to the customer cannot be unsent, not by the very companies who sent it in the first place. While Spirit offered very limited features and perks in service of their business goal of providing the cheapest fares possible, other airlines like American or United did offer those higher perks to people who paid for premium economy and first class tickets. The combination of upcharge mania among the lower classes and pleasant, courteous service for the higher classes sent the same message as Spirit but with a twist: We will respect you, for a fee. Of course, we then arrive at the ultimate conclusion that really was extremely detrimental to the images and reputations of all legacy airlines that employed these pricing structures—if a company will only respect you for a fee, they never respected you in the first place. Even the good reputations they had built through more perk-inclusive, bundled fares were undone when the à la carte pricing was applied to all of their customers. An airline that respects its passengers and wants them to know that they are truly grateful for their business would never subject those same passengers to pricing mechanisms that signal disrespect.
But the cat’s out of the bag now! Even if they switch back to the older pricing model, passengers will remember for a very long time all the incidents that showed them how little the airlines cared about them—long delays at the gate without ever providing an explanation or an apology; losing luggage and making the passenger do almost all of the work of retrieving it and getting it delivered to the right place; overbooking flights and then bribing passengers with vouchers to get off the plane; pre-emptively asking passengers at check-in if they would accept a voucher for a rebooking, sowing a feeling of uncertainty throughout the entire travel experience right at the beginning. For years, airlines have been whittling away at all of the small features and perks that, in the world of customer service, are often seen as buffers to help passengers decompress after some inconvenience or travel friction. The result is that same feedback loop that Spirit Airlines created for themselves: irritable passengers, frustrated staff, unintentionally working together to destroy one another and themselves.
It may sound like I’m being dramatic, and perhaps I am, but the continually worsening flying experience seems to be paired with the general diminishing quality of customer service in America more generally. Of course, Americans rely on airlines in a way that they don’t rely on the local restaurant of their choice. Let us not forget that air travel can become very dangerous very quickly, and the plane’s crew will be responsible for saving your life should the opportunity arise. Yes, we passengers can and should have more respect for those crew members, but they should also have some respect for us. Without us, they’re out of a job. It’s so odd that in an industry where the customer and the service provider rely so desperately on each other, that pricing mechanisms with perverse incentives and disrespectful messaging have crept into the market and made the consumer and the producer dislike each other so passionately.
There are two solutions in my mind: 1) The existing airlines work over time to improve customer experiences through excellent customer service. Gate agents who communicate more information with passengers, who get more customer service training, and see every friction during a flight as an opportunity to go above and beyond and make it up to the passengers who may have been inconvenienced. 2) A new airline with a new pricing structure enters the market, does put in an effort to focus on customer service, and passengers choose to fly with them over the airlines that were corrupted by the siren song of Spirit’s pricing mechanisms. Option 1 is the least costly of the two, but option 2 is the most likely to occur (as unlikely as it is) because sooner or later, I hope and I pray, someone with enough money to start an airline is going to realize all of the business they can steal from the legacy carriers by simply treating passengers like people.