SPIRIT AIRLINES

Ridiculous or not? I arrived at the airport on time, but I missed my flight

Getting to the airport on time doesn’t cut it anymore. Just ask Mayura Hooper, who missed her Spirit Airlines flight from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands during the holidays.

She and her two children showed up 1 ½ hours before the departure, but she says only two Spirit representatives were staffing the counter.

“The line barely moved, and several people missed the flight,” she says. Hooper was among them.

Spirit denies it was responsible. It claims its counters were adequately staffed and blames the Transportation Security Administration for a bottleneck at the security screening area, which made Hooper late.

“Delays at TSA are completely out of Spirit’s control,” Spirit told her in an email. “We held the flight as long as we could.”

All of which brings us to today’s question: Is it right for airlines to hold passengers accountable for what amounts to their own staffing problems?
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Spirit Airlines tells passenger who can’t fit into seat to stand

Katie Anderson’s son, Brooks, is 6′ 7″. The average economy class seat “pitch” on a Spirit Airlines Airbus A321 — the distance between seats on an aircraft — is between 30 and 31 inches, hardly enough room for a big guy.

When he flew between Chicago and Fort Myers, Fla., before Christmas, he squeezed his XL frame into one of Spirit’s tiny seats for takeoff, but was asked to stand for more than two hours, according to his mother.

Says Anderson,

They would not give him a bulkhead or exit row seat. He does not fit in a regular seat. His height prohibits this.

He is not overweight. It wouldn’t help to have two seats like an overweight person. This is more like a handicap. He can’t lose height.

Asking a passenger to stand for the whole flight is highly unusual, but not illegal.
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Did Spirit Airlines pull a bait-and-switch on a credit card application?

It’s no secret that airlines make a bundle by upselling customers on extras when they buy tickets, and one huge moneymaker is the affinity credit card. While you’re booking a ticket, a pop-up asks you if you want to save a little money by applying for a credit card. (What they often don’t tell you is that certain, highly-restrictive terms may apply.)

So when Pat Fancsali saw the offer for a free credit card — well, that offer looked too good to pass up.

Here are the details, as shown on the Spirit site:

FREE SPIRIT Onyx World Cardholder exclusive benefits include:
Get 15,000 bonus miles after your first purchase – which is enough for 3 roundtrip off-peak awards
Annual fee waived for the first year
Complimentary $9 Fare Club membership
Priority boarding and domestic priority check-in

Fancsali checked “apply now” and booked a ticket from Chicago to Fort Myers, Fla. And that’s when the trouble started.
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Spirit Airlines: “Negative publicity” on customer service could hurt business

Spirit Airlines, as you might have heard, is trying to raise $300 million in a public stock offering. Here’s the Form S-1 it filed last Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It’s worth a read. Companies are required to disclose any risks to potential investors. And although this one seems obvious, it’s interesting to see how Spirit characterizes its own reputation, when it comes to customer service.
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“There will be no further correspondence regarding this issue”

Alyse Goodstein is a casualty of the recent Spirit Airways strike. She flew from Fort Lauderdale to Punta Cana just as the work stoppage was starting, and she had to return on another carrier.

Spirit agreed to refund the unused portion of her ticket, but she thinks she’s entitled to more. Specifically, the cost of the new flight and two nights at a hotel, for a total of $1,296.

Could I help?
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And the next airline to charge for carry-on bags is …

We don’t know — yet. But a majority of airline passengers believe it will happen, and probably soon. A new mobile poll by Predicto says 72 percent of users think another airline will follow Spirit Airlines’ lead this year.

Does it matter that American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, US Airways and JetBlue Airways promised Sen. Charles Schumer a few months ago that they’d never do it?

Probably not.

Assuming those airlines honor their commitment, though, who does that leave? Among the major airlines, Continental and Southwest. And a variety of smaller ones, including the likeliest to try this stunt, Allegiant Air.
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Spirit’s Baldanza: Oil ad meant to combat “media confusion”

I‘ve lost count of the emails I’ve gotten about Spirit Airlines controversial new ad campaign, which urges travelers to “Check Out The Oil On Our Beaches” — an obvious reference to the tragic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

I didn’t want to do a “me too” post after every other blog picked up on this (including our friends at Consumerist and Talking Points).

But then I wondered: What were they thinking when they greenlighted that campaign?
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