Summary
Spirit Airlines has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing mounting losses, debt, and the failure of its proposed $3.8 billion merger with JetBlue.
Operations, including ticket sales, will continue as normal, with the airline securing $300 million in financing and planning to exit bankruptcy by early 2025.
Spirit has also arranged a $350 million equity investment from bondholders.
Struggling since the pandemic, Spirit deferred $1.1 billion in debt, faced an engine recall, and announced cost-cutting measures, including job cuts and selling older planes.
It’s almost like the “better” airlines already know how much you can shit on the customer base and survive. Pretty much everybody I know who has ever taken a Spirit flight has told me they never want to do it again.
I’m in the minority. I love Spirit. I don’t appreciate the dark patterns when purchasing tickets, but that’s it.
This is only for “short” domestic flights, <4 hours.
Yeah, they were always great for me, likely do to shitty practices, but when it’s a 17 hour drive home, and it only costs $42 for a ticket. I can get their cheaply easily. Not enough room, throw in another 40 and have a bigger seat up front that’s reserved and not have to deal with that southwest BS of random seats. You can pay more, but I haven’t needed to pay over $70 for a ticket traveling the short distances I need to go in the past 5-7 years.
For those not from around here my trip distance would be a little farther than London to Berlin.
SW switched seating, this year I think, to be the same as other airlines. It’s not completely random anymore.
That’s good, when I flew to PHX for work earlier this year I specifically choose another airline even though they didn’t have points just to avoid that. Probably a good move for them
Spirit isn’t that bad, as long as you know what you’re getting into. Frontier, on the other hand…