Tag Archives for spirit airlines.
An 18 year old woman says she was groped by a male passenger on her Spirit Airlines flight for an hour. She took video! And she says flight attendants told her to “sit down and stay quiet” when she reported it.
American Airlines has experience competing against Spirit Airlines at Dallas – Fort Worth and at their Chicago O’Hare hub. Now they’re being forced to contend with a big buildup in Spirit operations in Miami.
Here’s the game theory for how American Airlines will respond.
According to the grandmother of one of the passengers fighting, “[t]he guy in the black t-shirt and his girlfriend were fighting” after asking that passengers not kick the back of her granddaughter’s seat. There was cursing that escalated to “snatching” a pregnant woman’s hair. That’s when things really got out of control and a flight attendant made an announcement threatening to divert the aircraft.
On a Spirit Airlines flight on Monday from Orlando to New York, a family was kicked off when their two year old, who was eating yogurt, removed their mask. The mother of the two year old girl is seven months’ pregnant, and their other child – traveling with them – is special needs.
Eventually everyone returned to the aircraft – except for the crewmember who made an issue of the mask in the first place.
Wednesday’s Spirit Airlines flight NK185 from Cleveland to Los Angeles diverted to Denver after a passenger tried to open the emergency exit door of the Airbus A320.
The plane was pressurized. The passenger was never going to succeed. But he was ‘unruly’ and several other passengers on the plane held him down and zip tied him. When the plane made it to Denver the man was “wheeled out on a gurney by paramedics.”
There aren’t too many $9 fares anymore, and the program has recently been rebranded the Spirit Saver$ Club.
You can definitely make your money back on the program, especially traveling with family, but there are no refunds on membership. Not even when you cancel the same day the annual fee is charged. But a cancelled membership can’t take advantage of its benefits.
Usually it’s fairly cut-and-dried, people don’t dispute the facts or there is a contemporaneous incident with witnesses. Here there doesn’t appear to have been a social media maelstrom, and the family says this came out of the blue. There’s no due process involved. Someone could easily be banned by mistake, maybe a cabin crew member writes down the wrong row number by mistake or the wrong seats (right row, seats across the aisle).
A woman was removed from a Spirit Airlines flight to Florida on Thursday over her refusal to wear a mask. She told cabin crew that they were going to have to forcibly remove her – and that she didn’t have to wear a mask because she was eating. Back in September a man used a can of Pringles to avoid wearing a mask on an entire four hour flight.
Shouldn’t there just be a different standard for responding to disturbances on Spirit Airlines, with maybe the new Spirit Airlines frequent flyer program bonusing these sorts of incidents (though with their frequency, that could become expensive)? Treat Spirit flights like a sort of Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle,
Spirit outlined their new program in the fall but now there’s greater detail since the program has launched, specifically around the co-brand credit card and the value of points. And the program is enough of an improvement that it’s prompted me to join.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
