When Breeze started to PIT, I was excited to take advantage of them for a cheap weekend get away to CHS. However, that was not meant to be. I was curious how this little airline worked from an operational standpoint so I figured I should pass along my experience.

Schedule Changes:
I originally booked a perfectly timed Fri/Sun PIT-CHS round trip for $39 each way. To my delight, travelers with young kids get to book assigned seats for free. A few months after booking, Breeze reduced the service from 4x weekly to 2x weekly, which killed my desired Friday flight. I got an automatic email telling me that I was bumped to the Thursday flight which did not work for me. With no phone number to call, I found an email address, [email protected], and requested a refund for the Friday flight and to keep my Sunday flight. Within three hours (shorter than many of my hold times with DL was a Plat), they responded quickly to refund my one-way flight to CHS, keeping my return to PIT in place, while also refunding my prepaid luggage. All things, considered, I was pleased and booked a cheap connecting flight down on WN.

IRROPS:
For my return flight on Sunday, there was a large snow storm moving through PIT. My CHS-PIT plane was scheduled to go through PIT twice that day. I figured Breeze wouldn't want one of their handful of planes getting stuck at PIT for the night, so I booked backup flights on DL and WN. Sure enough, Breeze cancelled two days (!) in advance. While it is excessive to cancel two days in advance, it is nice that Breeze gave notice to allow folks to find alternative arrangements since they couldn't offer any due to their really limited service. This should be an understood risk when booking with these small airlines (similar to ULLCs with limited weekly service). I received the cancellation notifications through the app and email. Obviously there are no backup options that would work for me when it is only a 2x weekly service, though the app did allow easy changes to any other flights within 14 days (similar to the new WN policy). I was able to quickly request a full refund for my remaining CHS-PIT fare via the app. The most intriguing part of this story, however, was the email that I received a few minutes after the cancellation. Breeze was requesting customers to provide input on whether we would be interested in flying an extra section of the CHS-PIT flight on Tuesday or Wednesday (they were gauging interest in running an extra section since the next scheduled flight was not until Thursday). I tried to imagine a similar situation where DL or WN would email me and ask if I would be interested in joining them on an extra flight section created for my cancellation. Either way, I needed to get home sooner so I was not interested. It was, overall, admirable customer service from a tiny airline that, despite my best efforts, I have still not flown.