Ask most people for their opinion of Florida-based Spirit Airlines and you will likely get a wide range of negative responses. For years, Spirit has been expanding its reach across the country, offering its “bare fare” of unbundled service options such as seat selection and carry on bag as optional extras. With a new CEO at the helm, Spirit is slowly pulling its reputation out of a nose dive while still applying pressure on the “big three” airlines.
Once dubbed the “Spirit battle fare,” Delta, United, and American have all introduced various forms of basic economy fares to, in part, better compete with Spirit and other ultra low cost carriers. With the majors aggressively price matching Spirit, it could no longer afford to run an operation resulting in off the chart levels of customer complaints and a dead last on time percentage.
“We paid lip service to the customer,” said Spirit CEO Robert Fornaro during a recent interview in New York City, now in his 14th month on the job. “For the most part, if we weren’t doing a good job, the customer paid the price, and we were unapologetic about it. Over time, you kind of get a reputation that you get what you pay for, so to speak.”
In the Department of Transportation’s February 2016 Air Travel Consumer Report, Spirit’s on time percentage ranked dead last among all major airlines, with just 68.7% of flights arriving on time. A year later, Spirit climbed to 72.1%, surpassing four of its competitors.
“We’re not at where we’re going to end up,” said Fornaro on improving Spirit's on time percentage. “We basically have launched what I would consider a continuous improvement program. My goal is ultimately to get the airline to run fairly stable… A lot of things have been designed to get the airline into a steady position so we can really see where the issues are, and then gradually build in improvement.”
Meanwhile, complaints to the DOT hit 10.97 per every 10,000 enplanements in 2016, dropping nearly 65% to 3.73 in 2017. Part of Spirit’s problem stems from a lack of consumer awareness of its “bare fare.” About two-thirds of Spirit’s bookings come directly from Spirit.com, with ample warnings about the nature of the fare appear. The remaining booking come from online travel agents where the stern warnings about what to expect on Spirit do not appear.
While Spirit embraces the third of its customers booking with online travel agents and fare comparison sites, it is taking steps to better communicate post booking. If an email address is passed through with the booking, Spirit is now proactively emailing customers, rather than presenting them with multiple expensive surprise fees once at the airport.
Spirit does not currently offer a mobile website, smartphone app, mobile boarding passes, and only recently started offing TSA PreCheck, all common feature at any major airline. “These are investments that should have been made years ago,” said Fornaro. “We’re way behind and we have a lot of catch up to do. Quite frankly, it’s a negative not to do that. Again, we were in a different world where we thought we didn’t have to do any of these things. And then the world changes. These should have been ongoing projects over the years.” Spirit now plans to roll out a smartphone app this summer, more than seven years after Delta Air Lines did the same.
While many of its competitors have offered in-flight Wi-Fi, streaming entertainment and other high-tech amenities for many years, Spirit choose not to compete on product. Even that, however, may be changing. “We are looking at it,” said Fornaro. “We don’t see it happening this year...but there’s a good chance as we enter 2018 we’ll be moving in the direction of streaming and Wi-Fi. The economics of these things are changing… It’s something that we are very interested in.”
“I think you need to have quality for multiple reasons,” said Fornaro. "I think the new competitive environment demands it. We need to be better, because our competitors choose to compete with us, and we need to at least match up with them or be better.”
