Why I will probably never fly Spirit Airlines again

I was reading a blog post recently published by my fellow travel blogger Tay The Travelista who is an icon when it comes to the tips and tricks of the trade and budget travel and I noticed she mentioned flying budget airlines as one tip to saving money. I know that when people read travel blogs and travel guides or scroll endlessly on Instagram, they are usually in awe of how the other people flaunt the lifestyle of luxury when it comes to travel which can sometimes give “budget travel” a bad name. The term “budget” alone can make people feel a little on edge since it sometimes seems synonymous with “counting your pennies” or “being cheap”. Let me tell you though that you can still travel rather luxuriously and not break the bank.

I will write more on traveling frugally at a later date, as this post will not be about one of those times when I traveled luxuriously. As the title says, I’m here to tell you why I most likely will never fly on Spirit Airlines again in the future. I’m sure you’ve heard of Spirit Airlines, but if you haven’t, they are one airline carrier that is labeled as a “budget airline”.

Many budget airlines have several things in common. Usually, the main portion of the flight fee is very inexpensive. It can be very inexpensive to fly on a budget carrier if you are just trying to get your body from point A to point B without a lot of frills. How these carriers make money though is by charging for all of the “frills”. They usually have smaller baggage and carryon luggage size limits so if you exceed those limits, it comes with a hefty fee. Most of the budget carriers have fees for being able to choose your seat ahead, sitting in “premium” sections of the plane, all food and beverages, checking your baggage, baggage over the size limits of the carrier, and even a fee if you don’t print your ticket before arriving at the airport. The aircraft themselves are also no-frills and honestly, I feel like there is less space in the seats and the seats aren’t as comfortable as a regular carrier. I’m surprised they don’t charge for seatbelts or breathing the air within the plane. As I said, if you just need to get from Point A to Point B and don’t care where you sit on the plane, don’t need food, and don’t have any baggage, you might be able to come out on top without paying a lot.

I’ve flown on other budget carriers but flying with Spirit has left a bad taste in my mouth. I was returning to Seattle from a road trip I had done through the southern U.S. and I flew out of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Needless to say, once I got to the departure gate area I could feel the tension. Several of the flights on Spirit had been delayed…substantially. People were pacing back and forth, kids were crying, and the passengers glared angrily at the gate agents as if that could take away the anguish of having to wait longer to depart. I started to notice that it seemed like they didn’t have enough planes to depart on time and every time a plane would come in, they would use that plane to put the people who were the latest on their departure on to keep things moving. Announcements continued to come out on the overhead speaker attempting to explain the delays. My plane had arrived at the gate but there was an hour delay in order to clean the plane. While waiting, two flights that were destined for Boston and Philadelphia received the grim announcement that the flights were delayed until the following day. Several passengers for the Boston flight had exclaimed they had already been waiting for 8 hours and now they had to wait overnight although there was no guarantee their flight would depart on time the following day. Hell was breaking loose and I actually felt bad for the gate agents attempting to de-escalate the barrage of profanity.

I boarded my flight and in no time we were in Baltimore (BWI). Piece of cake! I walked at a brisk pace and actually ran at times to my departure gate as the delay in NC reduced my layover time only to get to my gate to see that my flight had been delayed. I’m usually pretty at ease when I travel so I thought that as long as I got back to Seattle that night, I would be fine. I was taking a red-eye flight because I had to go to work the following day. The delay was only one hour, so I still thought I’d make it home in time to at least get a few hours of sleep. We took off from BWI and everything was going just great. I think since Spirit planes are the small planes, they can’t go up as high and have to stay around where the clouds are. In my experience, clouds tend to mean more turbulence. I’m not an expert and I’m sure the aviation nerds or science nerds will get me in the comments, but that’s just the way it feels to me. So, after four hours of turbulence, the fasten seat belt sign seemed to be permanently on.

I noticed that we were over some city lights but it oddly did not look like Seattle and by my watch, we still had an hour left until our arrival. We had just gone through a reasonably severe patch of rough air when the captain came on the overhead and said “Folks, you may have noticed that we’re not in Seattle. We seemed to have lost our control panel and are currently circling the Fargo, ND airport awaiting further instructions.” Insert a long string of profanity here to mimic the long string of curse words that were going through my mind along with concerns about safety since we were still thousands of feet in the air. I just wanted to get out of that plane at that point. Forty-five minutes of circling later, the captain came on and said he’d been advised to turn back to Chicago, IL since the Fargo airport did not have the technicians needed to address the issue. This meant we’d have to go back about 1.5 hours even though Seattle was about 1 hour away. Again, insert curse words!

We got back to Chicago around midnight. The captain again came on the overhead and said we had to wait on the tarmac because there weren’t any grounds crew available to take our baggage off the plane. I just wanted to get up and stretch my legs and be off this plane but instead, we waited an hour for some of the grounds crew to be wrangled up to help deplane. The pilot came on the overhead again and indicated as there were no other flights leaving at that time, we’d have to spend the night in Chicago. More profanity in my mind? Yup, you guessed right. All the passengers sluggishly walked, full of sleep in their eyes, to the ticketing counter for hotel/meal vouchers. The line moved at a snail’s pace. I will commend that they had all the ticket desks open and all the agents there trying to move the line but each person requires paperwork and searches to find a new ticket that meets each traveler’s needs. Three hours went by. I finally got a new airfare ticket and a hotel voucher and a $100 credit for future flights. Yes, only $100! I really didn’t care at that point, I just wanted to go to sleep. They offered the hotel shuttle but I booked a rental car and headed to the hotel, which was about 30-45 minutes away.

I got the hotel almost at 6am and check out was at 11 am. Go figure! I did get the best 4.5 hours of sleep I think I’ve ever gotten.

As I had booked a later flight since I was already going to miss work, I was able to explore Chicago and see the Cloud Gate a.k.a The Bean which is something I had always wanted to see. So, there was at least one positive to this trip. I did eventually arrive back to Seattle on a different airline.

The second part to this experience has helped to solidify my opinion of Spirit and confirm why I most likely won’t be flying them again. Since they gave me the $100 voucher, I decided to try to use it for a shorter trip because I thought there was no way they could mess that up. I visited San Diego and I decided to go to Las Vegas for part of the trip. You can read most about my travel in San Diego, but San Diego is only about one hour from Las Vegas by air. I showed up at the San Diego airport early for my flight and before I even dropped off the rental car, I started getting the email and text message updates that my flight was delayed. You guessed it, curse words!

I made the mistake of going through TSA and checking my bag because almost every hour on the hour I continued to get updates that my flight was delayed. It came to a total of 5 hours of delays. Since I had a performance to attend in Vegas at 8 pm, I made a decision to just drive to Vegas because I couldn’t risk missing the performance. The line at the Spirit ticketing counter in order to try to retrieve the bag I checked was too long and wasn’t moving. So I changed my rental agreement for the rental car and headed to Vegas. I still continued to get delay updates and long story short I made it to Vegas in time and at least my baggage was given a free flight.

So, Spirit airlines is one airline I’ll have to take an extended vacation from until I feel at ease with the emotions I felt from these two experiences. I know I should probably stop being dramatic, but as someone in customer service, this just doesn’t seem right. I’ll leave it up to you to make that decision if you ever choose to fly Spirit.

I encourage you before you book on any budget carrier, read the fine print but also check to see what the cost difference would be if you instead fly on a non-budget carrier before you hit the pay button because you might be a little less stressed and maybe a bit more comfortable.

If you want to check out what Tay the Travelista has to say about all this, you can read her post 8 Minimalist Habits That Allow me to Travel More if you’re looking for some extremely useful tips on getting the biggest bang for your bucket when keeping your wanderlust at bay.