Spirit ditches bare-bones fares, turns Big Front Seat into 'business class' in major transformation
While the Airbus jets will still be painted yellow, almost everything else about the Spirit Airlines passenger experience will soon be revamped.
The Dania Beach, Florida-based carrier announced Tuesday perhaps its biggest commercial strategy shift yet.
Spirit is officially abandoning its traditional bare-bones fare structure and replacing it with four new segmented fare products as part of an overhauled passenger experience and effort to reverse its precarious financial situation.
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There's lots to digest, and you can find all the details below.
Spirit's 4 new fares, products
Spirit is introducing four new fare products designed to appeal to a broad range of travelers.
The new fare products include different amenities and ancillaries. The cheapest offering is the Go fare, which largely mimics the existing Spirit experience.
With this fare, you'll get a ticket and a personal item. You'll need to purchase all of your ancillaries separately, such as seat assignments, checked bags and snacks. Passengers traveling with Go fares will not be allowed to bring a full-size carry-on bag and won't even have the option to pay to bring one. So, those looking to bring a full-size rollaboard will need to buy a different fare product or pay to check their bag.
Spirit's next-cheapest offering will be the Go Savvy fare. This package includes a full-size carry-on bag or a checked bag, as well as a standard seat assignment. Snacks, drinks and onboard internet access will all be available for an additional charge.
The airline will then offer two new premium fares that include innovative new products.
The first is the Go Comfy fare that guarantees a blocked middle seat, priority boarding, a carry-on bag and a checked bag. These seats will also include a single pick from a small snack basket and one nonalcoholic drink. At the outset, Spirit will reserve the first three rows of its economy cabin for Go Comfy seats, CEO Ted Christie told TPG in an interview ahead of the announcement.
Finally, Spirit will revamp the Big Front Seat experience into something resembling domestic first class. Dubbed Go Big, Spirit's most expensive new fare includes a variety of benefits and amenities.
Chief among them is access to the Big Front Seat, which will exclusively be available to those who purchase this fare product. Go Big travelers will also receive all of the benefits of the Go Comfy fare, as well as a more premium food and drink selection (alcohol included), free streaming Wi-Fi, and priority check-in.
"It's now going to be merchandised and sold like a traditional business-class product," Christie said. He added that the new Go Big experience is built on the Big Front Seat's "tremendous success."
As part of the rebranding, Spirit is working to position Go Big fares as domestic first-class fares. It wants travelers to see these seats when filtering for premium cabins on online travel agencies and flight search websites, Matt Klein, Spirit's chief commercial officer, told TPG.
These rebranded Big Front Seats are designed to compete with the likes of what American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Alaska Airlines offer in the pointy end of their planes. These carriers all offer similar first-class recliners to the Big Front Seat, but their service offering is more comprehensive than the Go Big product. Many routes longer than about 750 miles will include a full meal service, as well as a dedicated flight attendant and a separate lavatory.
All of Spirit's new fares will be available to book starting Aug. 16, and the full Go Big and Go Comfy onboard experiences will roll out Aug. 27.
While Spirit hopes to sell as many of its new premium fare bundles as possible, those seats may not always sell out. Instead of letting those seats fly empty, Spirit's chief transformation officer, Rana Ghosh, told TPG that "behind the scenes, we're intending to take, specifically with cardholders and with some of our status members, a surprise and delight approach [to upgrades] that we'll roll out over time."
Spirit's new fares look more like something that you'd find on a major network airline than one of the nation's big budget carriers. That's by design, Christie said; he added that these are the fare bundles travelers expect to purchase nowadays.
"We are reacting to what the market is telling us about what's important. Spirit is moving as quickly as possible to deliver those products to its people," he said.
Spirit announced a slew of customer-friendly improvements earlier this year, and all of those changes will be included with the new fare structures. Namely, all tickets can be changed or canceled without a fee (subject to a possible fare difference) in exchange for a travel voucher that expires one year after issuance. Plus, the weight limit for a standard checked bag has increased to 50 pounds.
Spirit's new boarding groups
Spirit is also revamping the boarding process to account for these new fares and to reduce turnaround time between flights. The airline is introducing a five-group process starting Aug. 27.
Priority boarding will include groups 1 and 2, which will be limited to those who purchase Go Big and Go Comfy fares, Free Spirit Gold and Silver elite members, Free Spirit cobranded credit card holders, and active-duty U.S. service members and their families.
It isn't clear how Spirit will break down groups 3, 4 and 5, but we'll update this story if the carrier provides more details.
Spirit debuts priority check-in
We've come full circle from the days when Spirit would charge extra for travelers to print their boarding passes at the airport.
Beginning Aug. 27, Spirit will introduce priority check-in lanes at more than 20 airports nationwide. This lane will allow the airline's most premium travelers to receive front-of-the-line access to a check-in agent.
Eligible travelers who can use the priority check-in lane include those who purchase a Go Big fare or who are Free Spirit Gold elite members or cobranded credit card holders.
Bottom line
The changes come in the midst of struggles for Spirit. Not only has the airline been underperforming financially, but it also suffered a big blow from the U.S. Department of Justice when the agency successfully blocked Spirit's proposed merger with JetBlue.
All of that, coupled with rising costs, has led some of the biggest names in aviation to believe that ultra-low-cost carriers are on a path to bankruptcy. "They're going out of business," United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said on a recent episode of "The Air Show" podcast when asked about the future of ultra-low-cost carriers.
Spirit has been on a journey to transform the passenger experience as it seeks a return to profitability. This has included a slew of customer-friendly policy adjustments, and it's now the strategy behind this massive fare rebranding.
Spirit and its ultra-low-cost peers must do what they can to survive in an environment in which the major network carriers are competing more closely with their basic economy fares and more extensive networks. In fact, Spirit's big ultra-low-cost rival, Frontier Airlines, made similar policy adjustments earlier this year.
According to Christie, these new changes allow Spirit to "offer a few new things that are really going to give us an opportunity to compete more effectively in a broader array of product segments."
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