I see that Spirit warned on Thursday night that they are experiencing significantly weaker unit revenue trends in their markets due to competitive pressures. Their stock is doing materially worse, and analysts have been downgrading the stock.

That said, Spirit is still making a lot of money.

We'll see how this plays out. My guess is the Frontier is not doing as well as Spirit, but they're still "making money" because it would be almost impossible not to in the current USA airline market conditions. I also suspect they will be moving away from AA's markets! :)

Spirit originally avoided pmUS markets. It's very small in PHX even today. However, some PHX routes like PHX-LAS need more of downward fare pressure effect. Southwest fares for this short route are quite high.

NK went into PHL with LAS-PHL and DFW-PHL, however, even when it had an ACY operation just 50 miles away. But these flights provide east-westbound connections as well, so there is some extra traffic it can from those. A LAS-ACY flight would likely be too thin, although NK did once fly that oddly enough.

What was strange was that NK sold it's DCA slots, a few to Southwest, and it might have given back one or two, and it decided to just be in BWI for the WAS market. I've wondered if Spirit regrets giving up it's DCA footprint. It could have been in both DCA and BWI, like it's doing with PHL and ACY.

Frontier is holding on to it's three daily DCA-DEN flights, although these out of perimeter slots cannot be sold. It's outlasted the rise and fall of IAD focusing.

I think Frontier will persist on some AA routes especially those to MCO, as Frontier has and grows it's crew base in MCO and some investment to make the MCO routes work. MCO is a popular year round destination. I'd think Frontier would try to get on MCO-BOS and MCO-JFK, becoming a challenger/headache to JetBlue and Delta. It's going to need to be in the largest coldest markets in the country, where there will always be demand into MCO. The A321 economics needs large primary airport markets. I'm still surprised it's hanging on to medium cities like IND and BNA with a single flight to DEN, however, even though it might offer low fare connections to California and Seattle. Medium market to hub traffic out West seems somewhat contrary to the large city point to point MCO traffic in the East, but maybe the two revenue approaches balance each other out.

What does F9 stand for? I figure the "F" is for Frontier but what is the "9" for?

Nothing. It was probably the last "F" available. Southwest couldn't get an "S" so they went with "WN" as it was next available.

Off to DEN tonight on my first ever F9 experience. I'll report back whether it was worth the $296 ($196 total roundtrip airfare for two and $100 for 2 roundtrip checked bags).

I'm limbering up as we speak for the tight seat pitch! :D

After my TPA-DEN-TPA roundtrip for $98 each roundtrip, I will say that yes, Frontier is worth it.

That said, there was one minor issue that peeved me a bit:

Our outbound was delayed ~90 minutes with nary a word from the gate agent. We showed up at the airport expecting a 30 minute delay as reported by the Frontier app and email due to a delayed inbound from ORD, but it slid to 90 minutes without further info even though the aircraft arrived with plenty of time to make the turn by the new estimated time of departure. I'm fairly certain it's because they only have enough staff at TPA to dispatch one flight at a time and our departure slid into the next one, and they had to dispatch that flight before working ours. I'm ok with that, especially since there weren't likely any connections to be made at DEN that night, but they should have been better about letting us know what's going on. A quick update every 15 minutes from the gate agent doesn't even cost anything.

The seats really are terrible, but for $49 I can suffer for 4 hours to get to Denver. :D

Other than that, from what I can see all the complaints about Frontier seem to be from people who didn't understand what they were buying, though in my experience Frontier was very up-front about all of the various fees on their website and it's easy to factor them in to make sure the deal really is as good as it looks. In my case, even factoring in $100 for baggage, I saved $500 ($296 vs $800) on two roundtrip tickets vs flying Southwest on the same route. That alone more than paid for my daughter's ski lessons this weekend.

I agree with you all the way. I find Frontiers in-flight product to be pretty good. The seats aren't great but I don't mind them all that much. I think a lot of the complaints come from either 1) chronic complainers/whiners and 2)from people who bought their tickets through a OTA, where the fees and options are not well explained. Looking at Twitter there seem to be fewer complains as people get used to the New Frontier.

I think most people feel the same way about Frontier that I feel about McDonald's value menu -- which they just updated to give you two McDouble burgers for $2. It's a great deal, but it's a great deal on a product you don't really like. Sure, if you're hungry and in a hurry, it's a good option. But you'd really rather pay a bit more to get better burgers. Instead, you're left with the option of a not-very-good $1 burger, or a somewhat better (but still not very good) $4 burger from the regular menu.

So, by analogy, a smart consumer sometimes flies Frontier because it would be foolish not to -- it beats paying 4x for a marginally better product on a somewhat better airline -- but you still don't feel great about your Frontier experience. Buying a sucky product at a good price doesn't make you happy. I'm sure consumer studies confirm this.

I prefer INO style airlines... with hidden benefits ;)

However I'm not sure I want my seat Animal Style :o

Except from my perspective Frontier's product is not sucky, unless you fly Business Class or First Class or are super Elite on one of the legacies. Their in-flight product is comparable to Southwest's (including the seats) maybe even a little bit better with stretch seating. It's not as good as Delta's current product but maybe better than AAs. I haven't flown UA in years so I'll skip them. Frontier is often considerably less expensive.

This is a good point. It's not as if other airlines' coach products are filet mignon vs Frontier's hamburger. It's more like Frontier is selling a McDouble vs the other airlines' Quarter Pounder with Cheese. :D

Southwest's product is better than Frontier's, but in my specific example, it ain't $600 better. :D

Ehhh after spending a redeye in the seats Frontier has, I think I'll be avoiding them for such flights in the future. They're far worse than the Slimlines on AS and UA.

Yeah, the domestic coach product on the legacy carriers isn't good for non-elites, but it's still materially better than what Frontier is offering. Frontier seats really are bad. But it's all a question of what it's worth to fly something a bit better. My personal strategy is to go with the legacy carriers when they match (or get close to) the Frontier and Spirit fares. But if Frontier is half the price, I'd fly Frontier.

I wasn't on a redeye, but my experience was maybe one notch below DL coach or WN, my two most frequent airlines. Honestly if the seat reclined I'd have put it on the same par.

My only real complaint had to do with the way they handled our departure delay with no info. I found that irksome because a quick "hey folks, sorry for the delay but there are only 2 of us and we need to handle this other departure at the other end of the terminal and then we'll be right back here to get you on the way" costs almost literally nothing.

do they at-least put you up in a hotel if there flight is cancelled?