When discount airlines became part of the global picture as far as travel is concerned, I, like most people, were quite excited about this new development. Prior to that when I was backpacking I would always take buses or trains because air travel was prohibitively expensive for someone on a budget. These days, I sometimes encounter that the price of a flight is actually cheaper than a bus, so I don't really see much reason, other than the fact that airports are awful places to be, to not travel by air.
There are some caveats though and I encountered one of them recently and the other one was years ago but still something that sticks in my mind. Let's just say that sometimes it might be better to just pay a teensy bit more and go with a better, full service airline.
I don't really keep up with the latest news as far as airlines are concerned because I foolishly just assumed that they were already made as budget as they possibly could be. A few years back there was a bit of controversy about how certain airlines would hide the real cost of a flight until it came time to hit the "book now" button. They would conceal the various fees that come along with most airline tickets until the very end, thereby making their airline appear first on a search by lowest cost. Stopped by some government agencies around the world as being a devious marketing system, which it most certainly is. So now airlines were no longer allowed to hide various fees in their searches. The fair approximated cost needed to be displayed on their original search result. Some airlines though, looking to get a leg up on the competition managed to come up with an even more devious method of being number 1 in searches though, and that airline as far as I can tell is definitely spirit airlines.
Spirit Airlines puts all of the fees into the price they display but still manage to be the cheapest on almost all searches that their airline carries. So how is this possible?
Well the biggest thing is that Spirit doesn't allow ANY baggage at all without a fee and they are not very up front about this either. I was on a flight where the only thing I had with me was a small carry on bag and with every other airline in existence this would be fine and free to carry on provided you didn't take the piss and try to put 30 kg of gear inside of it. Spirit doesn't allow any carry on bags and if you have one, they charge you $50-$100 or perhaps even more in order to get it on the plane. Don't like it? Well then don't fly. The amount of people getting very angry for this little flight I had from Chicago to Dallas was immense because almost everyone had no idea that there was no carry on baggage allowance. How did we all manage to miss this?
Well, Spirit actually DOES tell you that there is no carry-on baggage allowance when you are booking but it is in tiny little letters the same size as the other things on your booking would be... or at least it was with mine. So after I ended up being forced to pay my $50 bag fee, my flight was actually the same price that it would have been if I had booked with Southwest or any other budget airline. Spirit basically tricks people into booking with them even though they are well aware of the fact that people will avoid them in the future. So what is the endgame here for them? I suppose it would be to make money fast and then perhaps change the name of the airline and hope that people don't notice. I know that even if the price of the ticket is more than $50 cheaper than the nearest competitor that I will avoid Spirit airlines at all costs in the future. Seeing as how they don't service very many areas, this should never end up being a situation where Spirit is the only option.
In a particularly terrible case that happened to a friend of mine, they booked a multi-airline international ticket that included a leg of the trip with Spirit Airlines. They were returning from Asia with around 40kg of luggage and the last leg of their trip was operated by Spirit Airlines. The trip up to that point had included a 40kg baggage allowance as well as a carry on bag and a "personal item." The Spirit Airlines leg of the trip didn't include any baggage allowance and by the time it was all said and done they were basically forced to fork over an additional $300 in baggage fees. When you consider that the cost of the entire trans-Pacific flight was around $550, it would be an understatement to say that this friend of mine was seriously pissed off.
While most airlines wont really even bother to check the dimensions of your bag or personal items unless it is seriously out of place, Spirit was checking EVERYONE and if you were so much as a square inch out of the extremely small personal item checkbox, you were going to be charged. Think you can get away with an extra 300 grams in your carry-on? Think again. Not with Spirit, they were meticulous and checked every single person and charged them accordingly.
I do not envy the people that work for this airline because I would imagine that it is basically guaranteed that there are going to be a ton of very angry people that book flights with this company. In my situation it was never mentioned at check in that I wasn't allowed a carry-on bag and while yes, it was on my printout that no carry-on was allowed, who really reads that entire thing? Hell, I didn't even print out the page that this information was included on because most normal humans these days just print out the first page if they print it out at all.
The level of service continued as the flight went on and trust me when I say that you are not getting so much as a cup of water from these guys. I'm surprised they don't charge you for seatbelts.
This devious practice on their part is bound to come back to bite them in the ass as far as consumers are concerned and I hope they get what is coming to them. I can't believe that this sort of business practice is allowed and since regulators apparently aren't going to do anything about it the only thing we can do is to boycott them on our own.