Spirit Airlines is out of business. Most people that bought tickets are getting refunds. Spirit is processing refunds for anyone who purchased directly through them.
But it’s really rough on the employees. It’s rough on the creditors, but they’ll survive. It’s rough on content creators. They had some wild flights!
You know who it’s really rough on? Passengers whose bags Spirit Airlines lost. Maybe they even found the bag but you can’t get the bag. It’s locked away in an office, and the employees don’t work there anymore!
Unclaimed bags in the Spirit Office
by
u/Mysterious-Oil-9874 in
spiritair
This photo shows a locked former Spirit baggage service office at the BWI airport. Lost luggage doesn’t become Spirit’s property just because it’s locked inside a Spirit office. The bags inside belong to passengers – they just cannot get access to them.
The airport and remaining wind-down staff are going to need to inventory the office. Bags with Spirit bag tags should be traceable through NetTracer. If there’s no baggage record, then that’s lost and found and hopefully gets turned over to the airport.
The airline is responsible for locating the checked bags. For truly lost bags, you’ve got a claim against the airline – but you’re an unsecured creditor in bankruptcy. Good luck with the bankruptcy claims agent. The credit card you used to buy the ticket may have lost luggage coverage.
There is a point, though, where a passenger would have a genuinely lost bag, files a claim with the bankruptcy estate – gets nothing – and the airline separately has the bag but doesn’t connect it with the owner, and sells it.. probably through Unclaimed Baggage in Alabama.
What’s telling here is that Spirit’s ground operations imploded so completely that they didn’t even have a basic asset recovery protocol in place. Any properly managed shutdown would have had third-party contractors specifically tasked with bag inventory and return procedures. The fact that bags are literally locked away with no access tells you how chaotic the final days were.
The NetTracer reference is technically correct but practically useless – Spirit’s system access is likely frozen or compromised, and even if it weren’t, there’s no staff left to process claims. The real story here is that airports are being left to clean up this mess without proper compensation or guidance from the bankruptcy trustee.
What’s not mentioned in this article is that DOT regulations on baggage responsibility don’t simply disappear in bankruptcy. The estate remains liable, but passengers are now at the bottom of a very long creditor list. The credit card chargeback angle is smart, but many issuers will reject claims if the service was technically rendered (the flight operated before shutdown).
“And… it’s gone.”
I wondered about this, and assumed that in its last chaotic days, more bags than usual got lost. Obviously a terrible situation for the unlucky passengers, but my guess is that between the Spirit estate (which seems to be behaving reasonably) and the local airport authorities, almost all these passengers will get their bags back within a couple weeks. We will see.
Why can’t they simply be turned over to the airport’s Lost and Found office? Essentially those items are lost.