I could easily afford any of their competitors but I always picked Spirit airlines. The pricing makes sense, pay more if you need more things. I liked Spirit because it was more akin to riding the bus, I got treated well every time by their staff and the experience was fairly consistent.

Other airlines also have cramped sits, what little they did better than Spirit isn't worth the price, and the experience was inconsistent: some times you'll get nice flight attendants, a comfy plane, and a good check-in/check-out, other times you didn't. can't plan around them. With Spirit I could plan around exactly how bad my experience would be reliably. Just about any inconvenience was some fee away to address it.

Frontier was the cheap airline that just wasn't worth it. On the flip side, AA was overpriced with snobbish (just my experience, very limited) staff. Because it's a "cheap" airline, Spirit came with low expectations, and it only exceeded them to the most part.

I shop at walmart compared to whole foods and other "better" chains for similar reasons. "great value" as walmart's motto goes, it isn't about the price, it's about the value you get for what you pay for. Spirit was the "great value" airline.

I don't think this effort to buy it will prevail, I only wish the GME betters were in on this action. The airline's value hasn't gone away, similar to Gamestop. The people like it, the demand for it there, the airlines assets and staff haven't lost their value. I don't see how it isn't a good investment. This attempt to buy it is to little, too late. but if it came in actual stock purchase agreements, I'm down for it. But donating random cash to some site as a pledge, I don't know about that.

Spirit seemed to enjoy making their customers hate them. everyone who liked Spirit had to explain themselves (like you did) because their reputation was awful. It was a trainwreck of a brand.

Agreed. I make decent money as a software engineer but I've probably flow 50+ times with Spirit. Like you said, they are predictable and reliable. What I appreciated about their staff is that they were extremely friendly but also capable of putting entitled people in their place. Oftentimes on AA and United, assholes got their way but on Spirit, they squashed it fast.

The only people surprised by Spirit were people who don't read warning labels and then you should only be surprised once. Heck, I paid 3$ for coffee on spirit but they would gladly bring refills and were proactive about almost like a restaurant. On AA and United, you usually had to go up and ask.

On top of that, you could get the big front seat (tm) which wasn't first class but pretty good about 150$ if you waited until your flight to bid. I got it a bunch and it came with free snacks and drinks and it was much cheaper than buying business

I'm gonna miss it.

> With Spirit I could plan around exactly how bad my experience would be reliably

Talk about damning with faint praise

American Airlines has actually had terrible customer ratings for some time (and I agree, they can be awful).

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/american-airlines-worst-...