US fliers love to hate discount airlines

When the delay on his 90-minute flight stretched past four hours, David Rankin started tweeting as he and other Spirit Airlines customers grew restless.

“We’re looking at the plane,” Rankin said by phone from a Spirit gate at the Philadelphia airport. “There are no pilots.”

Rankin, an investment manager, swore it would be his last time on the discount airline. “My wife won’t let me book a flight on Spirit next time,” he said.

Spirit is one of a new breed of airline called ultra-low-cost carriers that also includes Frontier Airlines and Allegiant Air. They have grown rapidly by luring travellers with cheap base fares that undercut the big airlines and boast among the best operating profits margins in the business.

Fans say the cheap tickets set the ultra-low-cost carriers apart in an industry where discomfort and inconvenience are now expected. But for many travellers, the new discounters take aggravation to another level.

They charge extra for things that are still standard on bigger airlines like soft drinks and carry-on bags. Need to print a boarding pass at the airport? There’s a fee for that. They fit more passengers on the plane by squeezing seats together, which is easier because the seats don’t recline. They don’t have toll-free phone numbers for customer service.

There are few businesses consumers love to hate more than airlines but travellers seem to reserve a special level of vitriol for no-frills, discount operators.

Passengers are about 20 times more likely to complain about one than about Alaska Airlines or Southwest Airlines, which have the industry’s lowest complaint rates. Either Frontier or Spirit has recorded the highest rate of complaints to the government every month this year. Allegiant would place third-worst, although because of its small size it is not included in the official rankings.

Many of the gripes can be tied to frequent flight delays. So far this year, Spirit Airlines has the worst on-time rate among the largest 14 US airlines – 34 per cent of flights are at least 15 minutes late – and Frontier is next-to-last.

In June, Spirit’s on-time rate tumbled below 50 per cent. It was the worst one-month performance by a large US airline in 10 years. A Spirit spokesman blamed a four-day stretch of bad weather.

With fewer planes and pilots, Spirit, Frontier and Allegiant have less flexibility to deal with setbacks like summer storms than do larger airlines – it’s not as easy to put passengers on a later flight because there might not be one. They generally don’t have agreements to accommodate stranded passengers on bigger airlines. It can add up to long delays as crews try to wait out the weather or fix planes to avoid cancelling flights.

In June, several hundred Spirit passengers were stuck at the airport in Las Vegas after cancellations. The same month in Atlantic City, New Jersey, two state troopers bought 15 pizzas to feed stranded Spirit passengers whose flight had been diverted there by bad weather.

Another source of irritation: tight legroom. Frontier added 12 seats to its current planes by installing seats with less padding. Its new Airbus A321 jets arriving next year will have 230 seats. Spirit flies the A321 with 218 seats, JetBlue with 190, American with 181.

Unhappy customers also complain about being nickel-and-dimed – all the fees offset the cheaper base fare.

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer, a Colorado travel writer, said she was a loyal customer of Denver-based Frontier Airlines for more than a decade. She “loved, loved, loved” the hometown airline with its wild-animal logos and friendly staff. But when the airline switched to mimic Spirit’s low-fare, high-fees model last year, calculating the cost of a trip got too complicated.

“It became a mathematics game and that’s ridiculous,” she said.

The discount airlines, however, have their fans. Traffic jumped 77% on Spirit and 39% on Allegiant from 2011 through 2014. Travel is up by double-digits again this year on both airlines.

Even passengers on other airlines might owe the discounters some gratitude. By keeping base fares low, they prevent the major airlines from pushing prices even higher – at least on the routes they compete on – says John Kwoka, a Northeastern University economics professor who studies the airlines.

Loyal customers say you can avoid most fees and save money on the budget carriers if you pay attention to the rules.

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au