Spirit Airlines' long shot |
Spirit Airlines' long shot
Spirit Airlines is shrinking its fleet and adding premium seats after bankruptcy, but rising costs and tougher competition threaten its turnaround
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Spirit Airlines wants to go upmarket. The timing could not be worse.
The discount carrier is preparing to exit its second bankruptcy this summer as a fundamentally different airline. Gone is the ambition to flood as many cities as possible with cheap seats. In its place is a shrunken operation focused on four markets and a bet that travelers who once chose Spirit only when the price was irresistible might be persuaded to pay a little more.
How Spirit got here involves both bad choices and bad timing. In 2022, Spirit spurned a merger offer from Frontier in favor of a richer deal from JetBlue, only to watch the Department of Justice block that acquisition in early 2024 on competition grounds.
Left without a buyer and without the financial cushion a merger would have provided, Spirit filed for bankruptcy that November. It emerged five months later, but the restructuring barely touched the underlying........