Spirit Airlines

Spirit Airlines

  • By Kerry D
  • Top Airlines
  • 20.08.2016

Not everyone needs to fly on a regular basis, and not everyone wants top comfort when flying. Spirit Airlines is an American low cost airline company with a fleet of only 79 planes. All the aircrafts are designed by Airbus, but before the year 2006 they were manufactured by McDonnell Douglas. This small fleet will take passengers to a total of 57 destinations in Mexico, the Caribbean, Latin America, and of course, throughout the US.

The history of Spirit Airlines is not very long. The company was founded in 1964 under a different name, with the airline service dating back to 1980. At the time, it was a charter tour operator and it was offering flights to places best known for their attractions and entertainment, such as Las Vegas. The current name was adopted in the spring of 1992.

Even though this airline is a low cost one, passengers have the possibility of adding extra options by paying more depending on what they choose. Some of the extra options include benefiting from selected seat assignments or travel insurance. Starting the year 2007 Spirit Airlines started gradually to charge for drinks, printing the boarding passes at the check-in desk, and ending with fees for the carry-on bags. The ideas behind all these charges were to encourage fliers to bring less luggage for their trips and to turn the company into an ultra low cost airline.

All these extra fees, violating various rules regarding consumers’ protection or failure to mention the fees applied to the advertised fares, attracted lots of complaints from the passengers and even some fines from the Federal Aviation Administration. Skytrax was also forced to reduce the rating of this airline to only 2 stars, out of a maximum of 5. Currently, Spirit Airlines is the only one in USA to hold this low rating.