Right before I went on vacation, Spirit announced that it would be switching up how it sells tickets, going into bundled fares that would make marked differences in the product you’d get onboard. Late last week, the pricing was revealed, so now let’s take a look at how it’s been constructed.
To start, we have to look at the bundles themselves. There are four of them:
The Go bundle is anything but a bundle. It is the basic fare that includes only a personal item and no other baggage. It does not include a seat assignment or anything else onboard in the fare, but you can add on some — but not all — bits and pieces if you’d like. Consider this Basic Economy.
The Go Savvy bundle is more like regular Economy on most airlines. This includes a standard seat assignment plus your choice of a carry-on or checked bag.
The Go Comfy bundle is going to be familiar to Europeans. This is like European business class where it’s a coach seat but the middle is blocked from being occupied to give more room to stretch out. This also includes snacks and drinks along with priority boarding. It’s not as good as eurobiz since it doesn’t include a full meal, but it’s basically the same.
The Go Big bundle is the top of the line. It includes the Big Front Seat which was named that because it’s a big first class seat that had none of the first class trimmings. Now, however, it does. It includes checked and carry-on bags, snacks and drinks, priority boarding and security, and wifi. So this is now a true domestic First Class.
In theory, these bundles sound interesting enough, but it wasn’t worth writing about until everything went on sale, so we could understand how much extra it would cost to buy each bundle. Now, it’s out there, so we can pick it apart.
My first impression is that there’s more nuance here than I would have thought. For example, the Go fare is not like Spirit’s old base fare in that you CAN’T actually add everything on. That fare expressly forbids the addition of a carry-on bag, just like United’s Basic Economy. That’s weird since on short flights, adding a carry-on would actually be more expensive than just buying the next bundle up. I’m not sure why Spirit would want to discourage that if people are dumb enough, but I guess it’s really about making the Go fare a reference price that it wants nobody to ever buy.
Interestingly, this means that you can almost never opt to pay for a carry-on bag separately in the Spirit eco-system any longer. The only time you can is if you choose Go Savvy and select to have a checked bag included. Then you can add on a carry-on for $50. (And by the way, if you select to have the carry-on included, then it’s also $50 to add a checked bag, so no difference in price either way.)
This bag pricing looks to be fixed for now. It doesn’t vary by time, distance, etc yet. I’m sure it will eventually.
Here’s another interesting quirk. The Spirit website has long been built to maximize pain by making you click through every single screen (damn you, car rentals) before you can pay.
That is still the case when it comes to a Go fare, and in fact, you now have to click a box and say you “accept Go restrictions” before you can even move on in that process, so it makes it as painful as possible.
But on every other fare, after you select seats, it now skips directly to payment. If you need to add a bag, there is a drop down you can expand on the page to do it. But for all the other add-ons like wifi, car rentals, etc, you would have to go to the navigation and click back to the Options page. I guess those weren’t drawing much money, so Spirit would rather just get you to check-out as quickly as possible so you don’t abandon the process.
The other thing to note here is that not everything can be added on. If you want that Big Front Seat, you have to buy the Go Big bundle. Or if you want a blocked middle, you have to buy the Go Comfy bundle. There is no option to just add on premium seating like there used to be. That’s likely going to be frustrating for some, but I can also understand why it’s done that way. People in those sections get differentiated onboard service, so if some got it and others didn’t, it would be very hard to implement. Now it’s all or nothing.
In the end, what really matters is just how much it’s going to cost, right? I did a whole lot of poking around, and have a rough idea of how this looks. To illustrate, I looked up every nonstop flight from LAX on October 15, and it appears that the upsell amounts are a tiered system based on mileage.
Spirit One-Way Upsell Prices On LAX Nonstops (Oct 15)
This, I should note, is not perfect. There were some markets that fluctuated by $10 in one direction or another, but for the most part this appears to at least be the starting point. Maybe it changes based on how much has been already been booked in those upper bundles where seats are more limited.
This says that adding in a bag and seat assignment will cost you anywhere from $40 to $60 if you do it in a bundle. Is that worth it? It’s hard to say. Spirit’s a la carte seat assignment pricing is wild. On October 15, the cheapest seat you can reserve on a Go fare is $14 from LAX to Newark, but it’s $18 on the short hop to Las Vegas. So your mileage will absolutely vary depending upon where you’re going.
Of course, if you need a carry-on bag then it’s not even on option with Go, so you should just pay up for Go Savvy. And if you do want to check a bag, it’s $50. Unless you are fine with just a personal item, it’s probably not even worth thinking about Go.
From Go Savvy to Go Comfy, the upsell is $60 to $75. Note that for anything over 1,000 miles, it’s $130 above the Go price. It’s just distributed a little differently between the upsell points in the 1,000 to 1,500 mile range.
This option only makes sense if you really care about the blocked middle seat OR if you need both a carry-on and checked bag. In the latter case, it means you’re only paying $10 to $20 extra to block that middle seat. That’s worth it. But above that, I’m not so sure. It probably will depend upon how long the flight is and how big you are.
The last upsell is from Go Comfort to Go Big. This is the true First Class seat, so it is a very different experience. Wifi is included as well. I tend to think of this as less of an upsell than just catering to someone who is specifically looking for this experience. The upsell is fairly expensive for people on a budget, and it may very well not make sense anyway.
For example, on October 15, Spirit wants $198 to Go Big. Alaska is at $131 for First Class while American is at $156 and Delta is at $161. Why would I bother with Spirit? On the other hand, if I’m going to Detroit, Spirit wants $315 and Delta is more than double at $664. Spirit adds huge value.
Note that these upsell amounts are not fixed. It does look like there’s a different upsell for connecting flights. And there does appear to be a bump on Go Big pricing during the holidays. But you get the basic idea.
From Spirit’s perspective, it hopes it gets nearly everyone buying Go Savvy and hopefully very healthy upsell beyond. If it doesn’t, it’s going to lose big on this. But for an airline that is posting remarkably bad financial losses, this is the kind of change that needs to be tried. It has long had a bad reputation, so an extreme makeover is a start. Unfortunately, this is not available through online (or other) travel agents like Expedia, so the airline is already starting with one hand tied behind its back.
Just as Frontier needs with its similar strategy, Spirit has to get a lot of upsell and hope that this friendlier system gets more people willing to fly the airline.
35 comments on “Spirit’s New Bundle Pricing is Out, and There is a Pattern Here”
I’ve only flown Spirit a few times and can’t remember how they enforce/check things at the gate, but I assume that they already have the system tools in place to make sure they get their $$$, and that it will just be a matter of enhancing their existing systems. Nonetheless, one would imagine that this new fare structure will create additional headaches for the gate agents during the boarding process. When a customer gets their boarding pass scanned, will the system prompt the gate agent to check to see if they have a carryon bag and provide the details as to whether or not they have paid for one? Similarly, if the gate agent sees that a pax on the “Go” fare has a carryon bag, will the pax have the option to gate check their carryon bag for the same $50 fee, or would they just have to abandon their bag at the gate?
On another note… It’s not uncommon for pax flying together on ULCCs to book different add-ons on the same flight (one pax wants to pay extra to select a seat & board early, her husband doesn’t care about those, etc). Under Spirit’s new fare structure, for couples or families it would make sense at times for one person in the group to choose “Go Comfy” (to get the 2 “free” bags, plus the other items in the “Go Comfy” bundle) while 1 or more other people choose “Go” and presumably sit separately in another part of the plane.
Their “first class” is the first two or three rows. The blocked middle seat is the next few rows after that, and I believe, at least on occasion, the exit rows. All those rows are set, you can’t pick any row to block the middle seat. This also makes sense since snacks are included, the FA knows based on seat rather than having to inspect boarding passes. As for bags, spirit boards by category and if you don’t pay for a carry on, you board last; so they know why can carry on plus it says with big letters on the boarding pass. Not sure if it’s changing but spirit charges $99 if you show up at the gate with a bag you haven’t paid for. I imagine with “go” they will charge that and require it to be gate checked.
Thanks for the info, good to know.
I’m always curious about how these things are implemented at the operational level, and your response was helpful.
The blocked middle seat rows are separated by 1 row from the Big Front Seats. This is so the blocked middle seat rows are rows that have arm rests that go up.
That’s one thing I hate about Frontier’s blocked middle. It’s kinda stupid in the 1st row because the armrests are fixed and you really get no more space other than elbow room.
Kilroy – I think this will actually make it easier for gate agents.
Presumably, those who book the Go fare will board in the last group, so they will easily be prevented from bringing carry-ons. The only other group that can’t have a carry-on is Go Savvy if they select a checked bag instead. I bet that’s a small group of people anyway. So in the end, it’s easier to segregate this out. Today, anyone may or may not have bought a carry on so the gate agents have to regulate more.
Thanks for the insight, Cranky. I hadn’t thought about it that way.
Spirit has a point system / rewards system, right? Any idea or announcement how the new tiers impact point gaining?
Is there a separate section for comfy seats, or can you choose any seat and the middle is automatically blocked? If it’s the latter, then seat selection/allocation just got really complicated. If it’s the former, then we are really looking at separate classes rather than true bundles for Go Comfy and Go Big, since they really are separate sections of the plane that would be able to sell out independently of each other.
I do like the ability to choose between a carry on or a checked bag though. Quite a few times I’ve traveled with enough stuff to fit in a personal item plus one bag, but the bag contains something too sharp or too liquidy for a carry on, and on legacy carriers you didn’t normally get the choice.
The go Comfy are rows 4, 5 and 6.
I’m skeptical that they will reliably fill their Big Front Seats with fully-paid Go Big bundles. The Big Front Seat was previously a great value compared to domestic first class options on other airlines, but they still didn’t seem to be reliably selling all the seats. In my experience flying a handful of Spirit flights over the past 2 years, I always received an email the week of the flight with an offer to bid on the Big Front Seat, and you could fairly reliably win the auction with a bid near the minimum (e.g. ~$20 for a shorter flight).
This change has simultaneously increased the price of the Big Front Seat, while also introducing a competing “extra space” option at a lower price point (the blocked middle seat). I think it’s going to be hard to sell passengers on the incremental value here.
I think they’ll continue to reliably sell all Big Front Seats on their longest routes (e.g. LAX-EWR, LAS-EWR), but I think they’ll continue to struggle to fill those seats with fully-paid passengers on most other routes at most times.
If they continue to have issues with Big Front Seat load factor, then it might make sense to explore offering upgrade certificates or something similar to their credit card holders. Could be a nice aspirational perk with a low incremental cost to Spirit.
I’m also curious if they’ll continue to auction off the unsold seats. That seems harder now that the seats are bundled with snack and drink service, though I guess the incremental cost of the snacks and drinks also probably rounds to 0.
If they don’t sell well, it’s easy to decrease the upsell price for shorter segments, maybe to +$40 for <500 miles. This can either be done dynamically as the airplane fills up or just an overall adjustment later on when Spirit knows a bit better how well different bundles sell.
I don’t think auctioning off the unsold Big Front Seats becomes more difficult with this change. Those that take it now just get upgraded to Go Big and includes all the other perks, just like buying an upgrade after the fact on other airlines.
I bought a short haul segment in Go Comfy today for the 28th.
Well, I just got a Seat Bid/Seat Hold email. The “Seat Hold” is new.
When I bought the ticket, the difference between Go Comfy and Go Big was $70 (and it still is if I go back and replicate the booking).
The email offers me an instant upgrade for $208 !!!!
Or I can do the Seat Bid… but now it has a range limit on the bids. The minimum bid is $110. The max is $198.
Yeah, that is really really not a good deal….
As a Gold, they’ve destroyed their frequent flyer program. For one, you can only redeem miles for the base fare, then have to pay cash for the bundle. So it’s still a crazy high charge to fly in Go Big even with “free flight” miles.
Gold gets free bags and priority whatever anyway. You have to now pay for all of that again in order to get the Big Front Seat – no more add it on just the seat since you already get the rest of it free.
The pricing even all that notwithstanding is insane. I’m looking at a business trip across the country now. Coach on AA/DL is $250 each way. Spirit is $75 for the lowest fare with restrictions. As a Gold, I could buy that and get the bags free. And it’s a non-stop flight at a good time. Because of flight distance, I could pay an upcharge for a “premium econ” seat. The problem is that with the way NK has it bundled, they want $340 for the “premium econ” seat with blocked middle and near $500 for the Big Front Seat. So instead of getting $75 plus maybe $200 for a BFS upcharge, they’re getting $0 and American is getting $250+$70.
I fly Spirit a lot because it works for me (or rather, worked). I make Gold on the spend. I almost always buy Big Front Seat, usually at time of booking, because I want it. But now unless I want to buy the Go fare and sit in the exit row (which I can for free as a Gold), the benefits are useless. If I want any sort of better seat, I’ve got to pay for the benefits I otherwise get free. At least with Go Savvy the system recognizes (at least on the app) that I get a free bag and only charges me the Go price. I just called to try and get a BFS on a flight I booked that’s about a 700 mile flight in a few months (booked the flight a couple months ago). Of course the only option is to change to a Go Big fare – and they want almost $250. In the past, I would have paid $120 or so at max at time of booking (which would make some level of sense as it didn’t come with bags, but Golds get those anyway). Now, I’m gonna fly American because I’d rather have the AA miles.
Let’s talk about miles… kind of like Frontier did (and a lot of this makes sense when you realize too that the long time VP of Marketing at NK left virtually the day after the B6 thing fell through and went to re-join his former boss Barry at Frontier) you can only redeem for the equivalent of the Go fare. I’m sitting on almost 100k Spirit miles. If I want to redeem on a flight to Florida, which is about a 90 minute flight nonstop, the most I can redeem is 2500 which is for Go fare. To get the other tiers they want the cash. It’s +$40/100/170 on top of the miles. I’d probably gladly give them 8-10k miles for a Big Front Seat flight. But they won’t do that. Maybe they still lose enough miles off the balance sheet due to spoilage? I don’t know, I have the credit card so they don’t expire.
What made Spirit attractive to fly for a repeat customer is no longer there.
The fact that you can’t use miles for a Big Front Seat seems kind of crazy? In most airline loyalty programs the first class upgrades are an aspirational perk that helps sell the whole program – people love to imagine themselves flying first class for free, regardless of how many caveats come with that in practice. Also anecdotally they are just not filling the Big Front Seat with paying passengers on a lot of flights – I get the auction emails all the time. Head-scratcher.
I concur that not being able to use the miles for the upgrades is ludicrous.
This is an incredibly thorough response, thanks for sharing your insight and how the change affects you…very interesting. I’ve only flown NK a few times in recent years (based in a city they don’t serve now, compared to RDU previously and being from Chicago), but in the few times I have, I was thrilled to be able to upgrade my wife to BFS for a very reasonable fee. This definitely seems like they are overvaluing that program, along with the plethora of other issues you brought up.
I’m only a Silver, but I’m with you. I’m disappointed that I can’t use my SpiritRubles to purchase anything besides to Go Fare. I guess too many of us had figured out how to game the system, and they are putting an end to it. I too have over 100,000 SpiritRubles, and the credit card, so I guess I’ll have to play it their way until I figure out a workaround.
You’re totally correct on all of this! I am gold also and they have completely destroyed any perks I ever had.
Also a Spirit Gold and my recent trips with them have already made me want to give up, this just seals the deal. With higher fares needs to bring better customer service and Spirit is so all over the place. Their phone service line is a joke and its known if an agent has put you on hold for more then 10 minutes, just hang up and call again as they just don’t want to deal with you and you’ll be on hold indefinitely. On the plane sometimes they seek me out and thank me for my status which is great, then other times they hassle me about asking for my free snack.
Recent flight they closed the boarding doors 5+ minutes before the time on their own board and refused me and 5 others to board the plane. Gate agent was absolutely rude and condescending, worst I’ve ever met. Had to go to the check desk agent and he was fantastic and as accommodating as could be. Unfortunately all this inconsistency means you only need to encounter one or two bad people to poison someone from the airline as a whole and many already are. I don’t know how Spirit can change from the butt of jokes to a real player. Unless they transform the culture these changes are futile.
I was also a Gold and due to the shenanigans of Spirit, my “benefits” were stolen from me recently (another story). Their illicit timing was great because after this “big, big change” (how a flight attendant referred to what was about to be announced a few weeks ago), I would never fly Spirit again anyway. What a great piece about another horrible decision by a historically horribly run business. What you forget to mention in all this confusion is and as if customers were happy with Spirit’s customer service in the past, just imagine what the gate and/or check-in atmosphere is going to be like now, and how many times Spirit is going to have to call law enforcement because they treat a customer so badly since their big, big changes have taken effect. Flying with Spirit was always fine once one was on the plane, but all other aspects of the experience, to me, have always been terrible.
In the prior structure, no one would even pay when making a reservation for exit rows, much less Big Seats. Those have always been filled by their auctions, and exit seats hawked at the gate. In this wonderfully thorough article about Spirit’s changes to their structure, the little bit of flexibility of Spirit’s customer base who will put up with Spirit’s horrible customer service is now gone. I foresee this plan will change quickly, but will Spirit be able to change it before it needs to enter bankruptcy?
I have not flown an airline where the phone customer service is as horrible as Spirit’s or the airport’s customer service is as horrible as Spirit’s. As a Gold for about 18 months, Spirit filled a niche for me as a person who lives in Oakland and flies about 150K miles per year, but it always came with so many customer service challenges and so many letters to the US Department of Transportation.
May Spirit Airlines depart soon, and never come back in any form.
Spirit is going away from its ala carte model. They don’t want to just offer you a seat but better service, like priority boarding, drinks and Wi-Fi. This helps them to compete with legacies AA/DL first class products. I would still try to do the seat bids for a good value.
Welcome back CF. Question, when you say, “(Spirit) hopes it gets nearly everyone buying Go Savvy and hopefully very healthy upsell beyond,” how much upsell remains besides a handful of BFS and seats with middles blocked?
It seems to me that the vast majority of folks will have their needs met by Savvy which means upsells beyond this will be limited. And that’s not very healthy from their perspective.
Bill – Good question. There are still a number of upsells into BFS and blocked middles, probably what like 6 or 7 rows? So it’s not nothing. But you’re right, most people will probably be fine with Go Savvy.
So it is 2 rows of BFS (it’s 2.5 on the A319, but the last one leaves the fleet next spring…. that’s another whole topic of Spirit’s fleet planning on dumping the smallest gauge plane when they have too much capacity). And then they skip the row behind BFS because it has fixed armrests. And then it’s the next 3 rows (4/5/6) with the middle seat blocked.
The seat is not even in the system so it’s not possible to assign it (the middle). Frontier the seat exists but just is blocked and a manager can unblock to use in an oversale. Plus Frontier also has their middle seat block rows including row 1 which has fixed armrests, so that partially defeats the purpose of more room if you can’t even raise the damn armrests, right?
Reliable sources tell me that this system limit plus putting a removable table in the 3 rows of Comfy is just a temporary measure. There will eventually be a different type of seat completely for those 3 rows that doesn’t have a middle. Think like Avianca has on its narrowbodies for the first couple rows where it is very slightly wider (same profile and size as the standard seat triple) but has a sort of V shaped table in the middle. In seat power also coming…
If the seats are physically different and not interchangeable, then Spirit will basically a 3-class LCC.
Is there a way to for pax on Go Savvy fares to pay for priority boarding a la carte? If so (even if the cost is significant and not that much less than the additional cost of the “Go Comfy” bundle), I could see that being a common add-on for those on the Go Savvy fare. Some people really get nervous about carryon space (even on ULCCs where carryons require fees or higher fares) and are willing to pay extra to sit on a cramped plane for an extra 20 minutes.
It will also be interesting to see if (and if so, at what prices) Spirit offers buy-ups of certain features (like priority boarding & security shortcuts) for those in the lower fare buckets.
Look forward to listening to the crew discuss Spirit’s new fare structure on The Air Show podcast; thought I’d missed a few episodes but looks like y’all have been on a hiatus for a few weeks.
One of Spirit’s advantages was simplicity, and had a laundry list of options to add (and pay for) if you wanted it. The above list seems anything but simple.
So what fare do they sell on the GDS? Just the Go fare? That seems like a recipe for pissing off customers.
Nick – Yep.
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/mLBdp7pj9U1dM8CG/?mibextid=UalRPS
Spirit is actually going pretty big into the NDC distribution pond, so that space will benefit with these bundles once the bundles go live on it.
I have a red eye cross country flight to FLL on 8/31 that I had previously paid $62 for a big front seat. I now see that they’ve “grandfathered” me into the new perks on it so should be interesting to see it shortly after implementation.
I don’t understand the blocked middle seat thing. It will be a hit to their CASM. Not good for a ULCC.
The option to pick a carryon OR a checked bag on the savvy (main cabin) fare is really interesting to me. Most of the time traveling alone I will have one or the other, but almost never both, just one type of bag and my personal item backpack. If this pushes other airlines to follow on their main cabin fares I could pretty much kiss paying bag fees goodbye for when I do travel with a larger suitcase, usually for Christmas
This is far too much BS to deal with. Especially when there’s no one at the ticket counter to check your bag 55 minutes before scheduled flight time.