It would be way too long of a post to run through the whole list of negative experiences I had with Spirit, but, iirc I flew them for two round trips … and the amount of service failures across those 4 flights was more than I’ve had in hundreds of flights on AA, UA, DL, and B6. I’m honestly in a state of surprise whenever I see anyone singing their praises. My mom, as an example, always used to sing their praises… and then every time she flew them would complain about how terrible every aspect of the airport experience and flight was… and then a week later would say she loved spirit. rinse and repeat for years. I suspect they were okay If you didn’t need to check a bag, or only checked a small bag that was very durable.

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You’re getting a ton of downvotes, but honestly I agree. I’ve taken spirit a few times because they happened to have nonstop routes that would have been convenient for me in theory. In reality, my experience on Spirit was so bad that I’d rather have a connection on AA, UA, or DL. The staff seemed to delightfully try to make the experience as unpleasant as possible, at every step of the journey on the handful of times i flew them. And, as far as price goes… once you start paying for the upgrades like an assigned “extra space” seat or whatever they called it … compared to what I’d pay on another airline, the value prop disappeared. I’d assume the airline algorithms for AA, DL, UA do consider each other as peers … and to some extent JetBlue, Alaska, and Hawaiian. But spirit and the like were probably mostly seen as pests who were not competing in any sort of sustainable, fair, or rational way… and assumed passengers would either opt in to Spirit and just not be mainline customers… or opt out and never consider them either way.

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That's never gonna happen. I'm pretty sure Scott Kirby himself is leaking the "internal UA memos" on the subject specifically to troll the media just so he can turn around and say hey this JetBlue thing seems pretty normal now by comparison.

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