sunnn

its unclear spirit is a cluster.... and might cancel days before or not till hours later

wrp96

It can be anywhere from in advance to after the flight was supposed to depart. At the rate Spirit's operations are going, I would just plan on driving now and not wait for Spirit to cancel.

vincewy

At this point I'd just get ready to drive and forget about playing Spirit Russian Roulette. Your worst case scenario would not be last minute cancellation outbound, but cancellation when returning, which you'd have no option of getting back at reasonable cost.

OhDoctor

Yeah even Kenny Rogers wouldn't gamble with NK right now.

sfozrhfco

The biggest mystery is why they are not drawing down their schedule and cancelling flights in advance. Why wait for everybody to check in their bags and be ready to board and then cancel? If they know that if everything goes perfectly, they only have staff to run 70% of the flights, why are they still selling 100%? If they cancel a bunch of flights now for the next week, people can decide to either not travel, find an alternative, or move the dates to a later time while they are home. It is a much bigger pain--especially on the return to have checked out of one's hotel, pay to get to the airport and only then find out you are SOL--and by that point there may be no other options that day.

They must really be running on empty in the scheduling/management team right now.

beyondhere

It's greed. If they cancel out flights ahead, they have to provide refunds to all the customers. But keeping the flight as scheduled and then waiting until the last minute, they figure some passengers might cancel on their own, or move the flight. They can also collect payments for the sale of new seats while not actually being intent of providing service.

Back in 2020, things were getting really bad around March, but Spirit wasn't canceling its flights ahead while other carriers were more active on cancellations. Spirit was offering no change penalties for those that wished not to fly because of the pandemic. So I changed the ticket for another flight. New flight was cheap, far out, and I did the option to allow one change. But, the actual original flight ended up being cancelled the day of the flight, and I could have received a refund had the flight been cancelled earlier.

vincewy

Here's a DP for cancellation refund.

Original PNR CMH-LAX-CMH (8/5-8/10), submitted refund request 8/5 (waited until day of departure while keeping my DL ticket), and refund showed up on my credit card today (8/8).

arollins

At some point they will need to cancel flights period in order to allow them to reset, get their pilots, FA to their designated base and start working on moving people out. I can only imagine that the local authorities from the airports affected already have had enough with the crowds congregating trying to fly out. Yes, there are people that are pro-active and have canceled on their own, and looked for alternatives transportations, but that is not all of them.

Super Mario

Having flown Spirit a ton of times, I can confidently tell you that 4/5 angry people are mad because they just show up with baggage, and get mad when told it's going to be $65.

While this is a colossal disaster for Spirit, it's not going to last forever. If anything, there will likely be less of a chance of this in the future. I'll use that opportunity to scoop up some more $150 RT flights while the "never agains" go on Southwest for $500

quikshifter

Flight to PVR still scheduled for tomorrow... At check in T-24 it assigned me 3 big front seats. No idea what's going on!

nd2010

I remember reading an article about a consumer group looking in to passenger complaints about airlines and Spirit was the worst.

https://uspirg.org/news/usf/report-s...-about-airline

pitflyer

Assigned one person 3 big front seats, or 3 separate people? This happened to me before -- my wife and I bought the cheapest seats I could think of ($0.01 base fare) and didn't buy any extras, but when we checked in we got the big front seats. Thought maybe it was a equipment swap (since I believe some of their planes don't have these seats?) but it wasn't .. I got those seats. Quite comfortable for a penny.

pseudoswede

They do. They just don't know the term nor what it actually means. Previous experience and anecdotal evidence when traveling on legacy carriers teaches them that sometimes they can be booked on another airline during IRROPS. When the stuff hits the fan with NK (or F9 or WN), they start screaming at the TA or GA to rebook them on another airline. That's when they learn that NK doesn't have that ability.

I remember one of my first business trips. I was asked last-minute to fly to SAN to join a project. Airfares were pretty crazy, but NK was something like $100 each way (next cheapest was WN at around $350 each way). I figured I would be nice and try to save the client some money and booked NK. DEN-SAN on NK went off without a hitch. However, on the return, the flight was delayed multiple times and eventually cancelled. I eventually got to the front of the line, and the TA said I could be put on another flight in three days. The only other airline that had a flight back to DEN that late in the evening was WN, and they were charging $600. I bought it, and that flight was delayed, and I didn't get home until like 2:30am. Lesson learned: I could've saved most of my headaches by buying WN for basically the same price.

I have flown NK, F9, and Ryanair. When things go right, it's perfectly fine. However, when things go wrong, you better have a solid plan B.

OhDoctor

That was predictable: https://thepointsguy.com/news/dot-wa...irit-airlines/

futuramadramallama

Agreed!

After a Spirit cancelation, I saw a friend's friend recommend she ask Spirit to book her onto Frontier "because they're sister carriers." What??? Beyond being similar in concept, they presumably have no relationship whatsoever lol.

EDIT: Interesting... apparently Spirit has been offering to book passengers on other carriers in some circumstances. Curious if anyone's experienced that, given their probable lack of interlining agreements; do they hash out some distressed passenger prices last minute with other carriers?