Never spirit

Old Jan 16, 2020, 5:10 am
  #1  
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Never spirit

I’ve been tempted to try spirit now and then, when a cheap big seat was available and the schedule worked with a nonstop flight. But flying out of Denver last Sunday I got a reminder to not even consider it. Near my gate was a spirit gate with a scheduled departure time of 2:50 pm and delay to 6:30 am the next morning. I did a double take as it seemed absurd, but there it was. There was no weather, no other delayed flight I could see. And you know all those passengers were getting nothing by way of help or compensation. Just “piss off and come back later”.

Thanks for the reminder, spirit. Next time I’m tempted to grouse about ancillary fees or plane swaps I’ll remember to count my blessings I’m not on spirit.
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Old Jan 16, 2020, 4:48 pm
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But they saved $5.35
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Old Jan 17, 2020, 8:09 pm
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Originally Posted by ricktoronto
But they saved $5.35
We have our own time vs $ calculations
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Old Jan 17, 2020, 8:13 pm
  #4  
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Originally Posted by Boghopper
I’ve been tempted to try spirit now and then, when a cheap big seat was available and the schedule worked with a nonstop flight. But flying out of Denver last Sunday I got a reminder to not even consider it. Near my gate was a spirit gate with a scheduled departure time of 2:50 pm and delay to 6:30 am the next morning. I did a double take as it seemed absurd, but there it was. There was no weather, no other delayed flight I could see. And you know all those passengers were getting nothing by way of help or compensation. Just “piss off and come back later”.

Thanks for the reminder, spirit. Next time I’m tempted to grouse about ancillary fees or plane swaps I’ll remember to count my blessings I’m not on spirit.
While I'm not suggesting that people fly Spirit (or Allegiant or Frontier), there is now a relatively inexpensive way to protect yourself against major IRROPS on such carriers:

https://www.getfreebird.com/travelers/
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Old Jan 18, 2020, 10:24 pm
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Originally Posted by Boghopper
We have our own time vs $ calculations
Well you might but at some point common sense should prevail when people do gyrations to save five bucks but spend that on bad coffee at so called "craft" coffee houses.
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Old Feb 1, 2020, 10:53 am
  #6  
 
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Too late for me

I didn´t have the information before buying the tickets so here it is my experience with them;

Worst airline I've used ever (and I know a lot of them). As someone said it should be called Scam Airlines"

The excuse that I read in some comments about them is that of "it is a low cost so you receive what you pay for", but is absolutely false, I have flown with US low costs(several) European ones (many) and even one from China, not to mention Some Latin American and African airlines of poor service. But nothing like Spirit's spawn and scam. This company is very close to scam and bordering on illegality). The maybe there are some who were simply lucky and everything went well (or rather, poorly) and they are not used to flying much and yes to abuse but this company is a scam from beginning to end, including the price, which in the end it turns out not being as cheap as it seems. I will not go into every detail as the fact they have the worst seats I've seen in my existence or the semi-scam they do with hand luggage; It is no only that they don´t let you carry for free what 99% of the companies do, low cost or not, but the fact that they present a pic in their luggage policies and use terms so that if you are not very aware it seems that you can bring carry on luggage, for later realizing that they charging you more for your carry on luggage than for the check-in. We luckily realized on time. I only comment those two things because they were the most blatant, but it's all like that. Apart from using the worst possible airports (other low cost ones do, not all of them) with the added cost of transport and waste of time, once again Spirit surpasses rival companies in the bad way and it is not only that they leave you at bad airports far away but that they left you in another country, for example, they are supposed to sell a flight to Montreal in Canada, that leaves you in the territory of the United States!But they sell it as Montreal.

But I better explain my experience. Apart from the general scams in which this company incurs and that we luckily avoided when we had to come back from our trip to New York they informed us that the flight had been canceled, a few hours before it, and without giving explanations. Of course, no e-mail or customer service phone number from the company worked. After spending a lot of time (when leaving the worst airport in the area there were traffic jams and the compaby was arriving to one airport and leaving from another) and money, to change airports to be able to talk to Spirit staff we found some company workers totally lobotomized by the company, defending their "master" and without making the samallest effort to put themselves in the situation of two people who had been left lying in the middle of a foreign country without proposing a solution. They offered us nothing (not a miserable bottle of water) or an apology, it almost seemed that it was them the persons having in troubles because of us. They did not propose any other flight with them or with another company, until five days later and practically scolded us for not having arrived before to claim. That is, if we had spent our savings on a honeymoon trip, for example, we would have stayed 5 days sleeping in the street of New Yorks as homeless, thanks to these people. Finally and after more than three hours arguing with them and telling them that in no way we were going to leave there without any solution, we got a refund of $ 60 per flight, for flights that had cost $ 269 each! ! That is, not even a half of the price for the part of the trip we wheren´t being able to do. In addition their excuses were changing, first it was because of bad weather, when they were told that there was a sunny great weather, they said that that the bad weather was not at the departure airport, but at the destination airport the night before and that the planes had not been able to take off. At the end of the day and after investigating, I realized that they had changed their flight schedule without caring at all about the passengers and went from daily flights to a weekly one. That's why they didn't offer us anything before five days! In the end, we had to look for an expensive solution , lose days of work and with it a lot of money without obtaining from them more than the $ 60 that wasn´t enough to pay the UBER that we had to take to return from the airport of departure to the airport in which they had people attending the counters at that time. As I do not like to be scammed, I claimed the US Department of Transportation (to discover that in the United States airlines can basically do whatever they want) and this seems to have made them more generous and offer us some travel vouchers. of $ 200 for fliying with them. I was not happy with the compensation, but at least it was something. Only to discover, that once again and in their style, it was a scam, they were only usable for 3 months (when other low costs, even some doing the same route as JetBlue give them for a year), and key point, they only were useful to pay the BASE FARE of the flight. And here is another of the "made in Spirit" scams, the "base rate" is nothing, and they make money scamming you in everything else, for example (we compare many of their flights), we look for as expensive flights as possible to be able to amortize the $ 200 and on flights that cost $ 300 they had a "base fare" of $ 0.6 ! That is to say, they had mocked on us offering a virtually useless compensation. Finally and as I am convinced that the change had nothing to do with bad weather ( there was god weather either at the airport of departure and at the destination) I asked for the statement of the DAT communicating that bad weather. Of course, they said they couldn't give me that. That is Spirit, a scam, it is better to pay double (which in the end is not double for all the hidden expenses with Spirit) and that what happened to us doesn´t not happend to you,making you to spend 4 times more.
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